


wearing all black doesn't make you cool

by scarredsodeep



Category: Lana Del Rey (Musician), Marina & the Diamonds, Marina del Rey - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Coming Out, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Family Issues, Girl Band, Goth Lana, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Misogyny, Lesbophobia, Mutual Pining, Party Girl Marina, Talent Shows, california au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24629953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: Inspired by the song WABDMYC by No Men. High school AU where Marina is a Welsh expatriate cheerleader and Lana is a weird sad goth kid who only reads books written by women who killed themselves. They end up thrust together in an all-girl garage band to try and win the prize money at the school talent show, because the same basic template of white boy wins every year and that’s unfeminist. About what it's like to be gay in high school, being a girl who is maybe attracted to other girls, who knows, it's a confusing mess, and trying to figure out whether you want to kiss the girl sitting across from you or strangle her.wearing all black doesn't make you coolbut it probably doesn't hurt and i think you're kinda cool anywayare you wearing that dress for me?are you wearing that dress to seeif there's anybody out there that knows how to have any fun
Relationships: Lana Del Rey/Marina Diamandis
Comments: 17
Kudos: 42





	wearing all black doesn't make you cool

**Author's Note:**

> One day you're doing a songs-to-fic-prompts tag on tumblr, and then BAM, the next day you're losing yourself in 45 pages of girlfic. I hope you guys enjoy it!
> 
> Pride is canceled, but happy Black Lives Matter. I hope you're out marching or at home donating or doing what you can--may this be a moment of lightness. 
> 
> Thank you to [immoral-crow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/immoral_crow) for the Britpicking, tireless support, and ongoing resuscitation of my terrible abrupt endings; and thank you to [objectlesson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson) and [Blake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake) for the endless supply of gay joy they meet all my fic ideas with.  
>    
> [Story playlist here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/72Yj7ZHoxUFiCe0bzEHqa9)

“Look, Emily Dickinson is watching us again,” Ivy sneers, elbowing Marina in the ribs. “Ugh. Such a perv.”

Sure enough, head-to-toe in black and haloed in long dark hair, weird girl Lana is in the bleachers again. It’s got to be hot in the sun—god knows Marina is drenched with sweat, her tan limbs glittering like they’re pockmarked with tiny diamonds, and she’s bare from mid-thigh to the top of her sneakers in her cheer uniform—but lately Lana has been perched there in the blazing California sun every day after school, surrounded by library books, all in black. Marina can’t tell if she’s sweaty from this distance, but she bets that Lana del Rey doesn’t even have sweat glands. She’s too perfect.

Then Marina notices herself _thinking about Lana del Rey’s sweat glands, like a fucking creep,_ and wipes her brain blank. She pastes her sharpest smile across her face and singsongs, “La-na the Les-bo” to make Ivy laugh. Lana’s head jerks, like maybe she caught the sound of the familiar chorus on the breeze, but Marina doesn’t think about it. She Does Not Think About It.

Not Thinking About Lana is one of Marina’s most time-consuming activities these days.

Ugh. She doesn’t think about that either.

In the locker room, Marina’s stripped down to her sweaty sports bra and underpants when she spots the fliers taped to the wall. “Ooh, a talent show? With a cash prize? We should enter.” 

Marina peels a flier off the wall and shows it to Ivy. Ivy’s shimmying into tiny denim shorts. “It’s totally lame, Reen. Trust me. No one cool does the talent show.”

Marina sniffs the t-shirt in the bottom of her locker. Not clean, exactly, but better than her soaked cheer top. She pulls it on and hops into her jeans, still brandishing the flier at Ivy. “C’mon, my school in Wales never did anything like this. Pleeease, Ives?”

Ivy wrinkles her perfect button nose. She’s long and tan and beautiful, probably, swishing gold ponytail and little shorts and halter top, but for some reason Marina doesn’t get the same sick-dizzy Lana lurch around Ivy, like she’s standing at the edge of a cliff and trying to remind herself it’s a bad idea to jump. 

“I’m telling you, it’s a total joke. I wouldn’t be caught dead onstage. Besides, what would you even do? People see your cheer routine at every game and competition. It’s not, like, a _talent_.”

Marina folds the flier carefully and stuffs it in her back pocket. She’s never been one to be talked out of things. “Come to the talent show and see,” she says. Ivy rolls her perfectly lined eyes. Marina sticks her tongue out back.

All the next day at school, Marina tries to get her friends to agree to a talent show performance. Nobody will do it, but finally in her U.S. History class (which she’s totally failing, by the way. Welsh immigrants are at a _major_ disadvantage) someone at least tells her _why_.

“There’s no point,” a girl called Valerie tells her. “Every year some mediocre garage band dudes win by playing, like, Nirvana or something. It’s Mr. Meisner’s favorite, and he’s always the judge. So it’s totally rigged.

Marina chews her lip. “What happens if girls play Nirvana?”

“I think that happened my freshman year,” Valerie says. “Yeah. Some girl did Smells Like Teen Spirit on her violin. Doesn’t matter. Mr. Meisner only picks upperclassman boys from his modern music theory elective.”

Marina’s just opened her mouth to declare this bullshit when a surprisingly low voice interrupts them: “My theory is he does it so they let him smoke weed with them behind the auditorium afterwards. Relive his glory days. They’re all the same basic template of white boy anyway.”

Marina nearly falls out of her chair. It’s Lana. Weird Lana who always wears black and only reads books by women who killed themselves and never shows her forearms. Pale, doll-like Lana with the gorgeous floaty hair and the too-big ears and the rose-colored lips that look terribly soft, that are so fleshy pink that the rest of her smooth round face looks tinged with drowning-blue. Lana who Marina definitely doesn’t think about. Lana who Marina has never actually spoken to before.

“Well that’s. Um. It’s.” Marina’s having a stroke. She can’t get words off her tangled tongue.

“Sad?” suggests Valerie.

“Ultra-pathetic,” agrees Lana.

Meanwhile Marina’s focusing on trying not to drool. Valerie and Lana keep complaining about Meisner specifically and men in general while the USH teacher hands back chapter quizzes. Marina’s has a big red _D_ on it, of course. If someone gave her a quiz on the 1536 Act of Union in Wales, she’d rock it.

“You know, if you ever want help studying…” Lana says, and Marina swears she can feel the words on her skin. Why can she feel the words on her skin?

“It’s _unfeminist_ ,” Marina blurts out, totally interrupting Lana, totally apropos of nothing. Lana and Valerie both blink at her. “Um, that girls never win the talent show. I’m going to put together an act so good that _has_ to win. All girls, and all the songs we play will be by girls. Vive la revolucion!”

“Wrong revolution, Diamandis. Focus on the Western hemisphere and you might actually bring your grade up,” the teacher calls unhelpfully from a few rows over.

Marina thinks about sliding off her chair and doing the rest of this class from the floor. But then spooky, weird, romantic, beautiful Lana says, “I’ll do it with you.”

“Do it?” Marina echoes dumbly.

“The band. For the talent show? I can play the guitar. And sing.” She brushes her fingers along the spine of the tattered Iris Chang book that she’s carrying today. “If you’re interested?”

Being alone with Lana is a very, very bad idea. It flies in the face of all instincts towards self-preservation. What did she even move to the States for, if it wasn’t to be more careful? But it’s like Marina doesn’t have control of her own body anymore, because she’s nodding like a marionnette on a string. She’s saying, “Yes! That would be brilliant!” Worse, she’s saying, “Want to come over this weekend, then? To work on our wicked plan?”

Worst of all, Lana’s grabbing her hand. Electricity’s shooting up Marina’s arm so hard it makes her teeth rattle. With her black stick pen, Lana writes something on Marina’s hand.

Her phone number. She’s written her phone number on Marina’s palm. Marina just goggles at it. “Call me,” Lana says, laughing gently. “If you want.”

But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Marina _wants_.

And that’s how weird goth girl Lana del Rey ends up in Marina’s aunt’s basement. Even though all Marina’s friends think she’s a perv. (God, Marina hopes she’s a perv.)

But see, thoughts like that? That’s how _Marina_ ended up in her aunt’s basement, instead of with her parents back in Wales. So it doesn’t bear thinking about. Put it on the list.

Lana is blowing these big cartoonish bubbles with honest-to-god pink chewing gum, which now and forever is completely unfair. It makes her look innocent like a little kid, while her skirt’s rucked up and her knee socks are slumping and the skin that shows in between drags Marina’s eyes to it like it’s radioactive. Not being funny, it makes Marina want to die.

“That’s your keyboard?” Lana asks her, pointing a stubby black fingernail.

“Been playing since I was small, yeah. Mam and Dad thought I’d be a classical pianist or something, but I think I’d rather be a pop star.” Marina changed her outfit like, six times while she was waiting for Lana to get here. It was part _not able to make up her mind_ and part _sweating through everything_. She ended up in a lime green leotard with baggy, ripped-up jeans over it and a soft grey half-hoodie with a faded UCLA logo on it that belonged to her aunt, before she cut it up. Her earrings are big silver outlines of stars. She put on glitter lipgloss, but she’s already nervously chewed it all off. 

“So play something for me, pop star,” says Lana, her floaty voice somewhere between casual and challenging. 

Marina is pretty sure she’s dreaming. She’d pinch herself, except she doesn’t want to wake up. Her cheeks are burning with uncharacteristic shyness. She does backflips in a sports bra and spanx in front of a stadium full of her peers, no problem; but one girl’s green-brown gaze paralyzes her. 

Definitely too shy to play any of the things she’s written herself, Marina thinks about what Valerie said: Nirvana. She picks out the opening chords of one of their songs and makes her voice go all strung-out and groany like Kurt Cobain. She starts moaning out the words to All Apologies, and Lana is cackling with glee, and she feels it’s going pretty well until she realizes the next line of the song is _everyone is gay_ , and her hands slide off the keyboard with a discordant plunk and she blushes pinker than Lana’s bubblegum.

“No, keep going!” Lana giggles. “You sound exactly like the boy clones who always win. If we dressed in drag and played that, no one would even know the difference.”

Marina twirls a bleach-blonde lock of her thick hair in contemplation. “I think it makes the point better if they know we’re girls, though.”

Lana rolls her eyes and grabs her own boobs. Marina is _definitely_ dreaming. “They’ll know we’re girls,” she says. “But you’re right. We should dress up like movie stars, big hair and big sunglasses and outrageous dresses.”

Marina will never admit how much she’d like to see Lana in a dress she considers _outrageous_. So many unbidden images spring to mind at once, Marina needs her brainpan scrubbed out with bleach.

“I have just the thing,” her traitorous mouth says, and she reaches out and grabs Lana’s hand. “Come to my room. I’ll show you.”

And that’s how fey, bookish Lana del Rey ends up in Marina’s bedroom. Marina must be an utter _twat_ to get herself into these situations, after she’s been in the U.S. for four months and started over at a new school and had everything going so _well_.

Lana, oblivious to the way Marina is obliged to swallow her gasp into a weird, painful hiccough, tucks her long hair behind her ears and digs into Marina’s closet. “I can’t believe you have a walk-in!” Lana says, disappearing into the depths. “Wow, you have _so much_ stuff.” She twirls, the pink skirt of Marina’s flamenco-style dress swirling around her legs. Marina’s heart beats harder at the prospect of Lana in color.

Marina doesn’t know how to say _my family buys me too much because they feel guilty for sending me away_ without being a bummer, so she says, “Me? I’ve never seen you wear the same dress twice. You must have more clothes than I do.”

Lana emerges from the closet again, this time with Marina’s white plastic sunglasses on and a bronze brocade waistcoat over her black polo shirt. “You’re keeping track?” she asks, and Marina’s stomach falls out of the sky. “Of what I wear?”

“No!” Marina lies, too fast.

Lana pulls the sunglasses down her nose to give Marina a look. “I notice what you wear too,” she says. “And I’ve never seen _half_ this stuff. Please wear this to school?” She pulls out a vintage blue velvet number, with a wrap skirt and a square neckline. “You’d look so Norman Rockwell.”

“Try it on,” Marina blurts, before she catches herself. God almighty, it’s like she’s not even trying. If she cocks up here, too, what continent will they send her to next? Fucking Antarctica? No girls there, at least, unless she gets caught standing too close to a lady penguin. “The bathroom’s down the—”

But Lana’s shirt has already hit the floor. The other girl is averting her eyes shyly, which leaves Marina to goggle in shock without witness. Lana’s bra, defying all expectations, is not black; it’s a pale, overwashed lavender, soft over the moon-pale breasts that threaten to spill out of it. From very far away, with whatever she still has of a brain, Marina thinks that she likes how Lana’s not skinny, not like Marina tries to be, not like the other cheerleaders are. There’s a gravity to her limbs, a tapered thickness. Her stomach is soft and kissable, her belly with the smallest bit of pad; the top of her hips beg to be fitted into Marina’s cupped palms, where the ink digits of Lana’s number still burn.

Then Lana’s skirt drops and Marina finally remembers to turn away. She holds her breath, facing the door of her room, praying to the saint of wayward girls, whoever she is, that her aunt doesn’t pick this moment to walk in. 

“I think I need a necklace,” Lana’s voice comes from behind her. Marina takes in a gulp of air before she turns. It’s a good thing, too: Lana might as well be made of stained glass. She’s wrapped in velvet and light shines out of her skin, no longer pale white but instead shimmering mother-of-pearl. Her hand with its bitten black fingernails flutters at the place her breasts meet, outlining the necklace she’s imagining.

Marina exhales. One breath at a time, that’s the way through this. “No, you’re perfect without one,” she says. “The dress, I mean. Is perfect. Well lush. You should definitely wear it to the talent show.” She’s sweating, the feeling of a trapped animal struggling in her chest, and she knew from the minute she suggested it that it was a mistake to invite Lana here, it was a mistake to invite her to Marina’s bedroom _specifically_ , she’s going to slip up and get run out of another school like she did back home— “We really should head back out there and practice some songs,” she tries, desperate to get Lana out of her bedroom before she implodes.

“No way,” Lana grins, diving back into the closet. “Not until we find you a costume too.”

Marina’s knees feel weak, so she lets herself sink onto her bed. “All right,” she says, because she’s clearly outmatched here, and there’s no point in protesting. “But I want something with sequins.”

By the time Marina’s aunt _does_ come downstairs, both girls are decked out in dresses—Lana in the blue velvet, Marina in a skintight, silver sequin charity shop find with a geometric side cut-out—and dripping with costume jewelry. They’ve done each others’ make-up, and Lana has drawn a little heart on Marina’s cheek with eyeliner that Marina cannot begin to interpret, but definitely looks fabulous. Lana’s got her guitar and Marina’s behind her keyboard, but neither is playing her instrument anymore. They’re just talking. Nothing could be more innocent, except the feeling that tenses up Marina’s belly whenever she manages to make Lana laugh.

Aunt Brynn is carrying a Domino’s box, and the smell of cheap cheesy pizza precedes her. One thing Marina has not gotten used to in four months in the States is the food. They have Domino’s in the U.K., sure, but there it tastes like pizza. In the U.S. it’s more like carby, cheesy, somehow-sugary, cardboard-flavored-but-in-a-good-way mana from heaven. 

“Oh, hello,” Aunty Brynn says to Lana. “I was expecting Ivy and the girls. Are you new to the squad, sweetie?”

“Aunty, I can have _other friends_ ,” Marina protests.

“I’m not a cheerleader,” Lana explains. “And we’re not really friends. We’re just doing the talent show together.”

Marina is unaccountably stung by the other girl’s words. Lana’s said them matter-of-factly, no hurt intended—just describing the situation for what Marina guesses it is. It’s not like they ever exchanged any words before this week, unless you count the times Marina has teased her with the other cheer girls. _La-na the Les-bo_ , Marina can hear herself singing, and not just on one occasion.

The bright, carbonated goodness of the afternoon they’ve spent talking, playing music, and laughing evaporates. Without its bubbles beneath her, Marina finds her mood plummeting fast, a nosedive towards the dark place she’s sworn her new California friends will never find out about. Of course they aren’t friends. Of course Lana doesn’t really like her. They’re united for the common good, that’s all. Feminist crusaders. Accomplices of convenience, and nothing more.

Worse, Aunt Brynn is giving Marina an appraising look now, like she’s trying to warn her off from shipwrecking herself on another pretty, unattainable girl. Marina feels an ugly protestation rising in her. She wants to tell Aunt Brynn that _Lana_ is the weird one, _Lana_ is the social outcast at school, basically a charity case for someone of Marina’s popularity. And Marina only looked for a _minute_ , while Lana was changing. Less than a minute. She’s not doing anything wrong.

“It’s just Lana,” Marina mumbles ungraciously. “She was going home soon anyway.”

“Well, you’re welcome to stay for pizza, love,” says Aunt Brynn, her voice extra warm to make up for Marina’s rudeness. “It’s nice to see Marina branching out and making more friends. I was so worried when she moved here last summer that she wouldn’t meet anyone—senior year and all, everyone already settled in their groups of friends—but everyone’s been so welcoming.”

Marina’s eyes are burning with the promise of tears. She’s embarrassed, or hurt, or furious at Aunt Brynn for being so embarrassing—she’s seventeen years old. She’s everything at once. She tries to think of some cruel thing she can say that will get everyone to leave her alone before she starts crying, but Lana beats her to it. 

“Like Marina said, I should probably go home. I’m vegan, so. No cheese.” Lana stands up, the three of them in an awkward standoff around the offering of pizza. “Thank you though. I’ll just change out of Marina’s dress and—”

“Keep it,” Marina says, and her voice comes out brusque and mean. “It needs to be washed now anyhow. You can just hold onto it until the show.”

Lana’s fingers twitch at the heavy skirt of her dress. She doesn’t look at Marina. “Okay,” she says, and her voice is close to a whisper. Everything feels jagged. Marina breathes through her teeth, feeling the sobs creeping on hooked feet up her throat. If Lana wants to leave, Marina wants her already gone. “See you at school.”

And Lana takes her guitar by the neck and hurries up the stairs.

The worst part of all of it is, when Marina is finally alone with a huge fucking pizza to cry in her room, Lana’s black clothes are crumpled in a pile at the foot of her bed. Marina kicks them to the floor, furious, before she can lose the unending battle against herself and smell them.

*

No one’s more surprised than Lana when Marina Diamandis marches up to her in the cafeteria on Monday, plunks her diet soda on the table, and sits down.

“So when’s our next band practice?” Marina asks.

She’s touched up her hair, Lana thinks, since now it’s platinum from tip to root. The effect is that of putting on armor: like the black half-inch at her hairline was somehow vulnerable, a window in to whoever Marina really is, underneath the cheer uniform. 

_Not_ like that. Lana didn’t mean it like _that_.

“Sorry, but you can’t sit here,” Lana says. She’s still feeling pretty frosty from being effectively chased out of Marina’s house over the weekend. Marina was so clearly embarrassed of her, even just in front of her mom. Lana can’t imagine why Marina would want to be seen with her in public, at school. “It would be social suicide.”

“Oh, my friends know we’re doing the talent show together,” Marina says breezily. She’s wearing a snug white sundress today, with tiny sunflower petals stitched around the white eyelets in the fabric. Lana kind of can’t deal with it. 

“I meant for _me_ ,” Lana corrects her. “I can’t be seen fraternizing with blondes.”

Marina regards her levelly for a minute, then starts laughing. Lana hadn’t made up her mind yet about whether she was joking, but Marina’s laugh is so sudden and loud, too big for her delicate body, Lana can’t help but get swept up in it. She flashes a smile that Marina really hasn’t earned and ducks her head. 

“We’ve got less than a month to prepare,” Marina goes on when she’s stopped laughing. She pops the tab on her soda, takes a sip, and grimaces. “Ugh. I hate diet, but if I gain any more weight, they won’t let me be a flyer in cheer.”

“The wages of sin,” Lana says primly.

“The wages of vanity, to be honest. But you haven’t lived til you’ve stood on the shoulders of the tiniest girl in school, every one of your friends a sly glance upward away from getting a faceful of your knickers. So if we only practice on weekends, do you think we’ll have enough time to get ready for the show? I mean, you’re really good, so I’m sure you’ll be fine, but I haven’t ever played with someone else before, so…”

Lana totally does not get this girl. First she’s as mean as her airhead popular friends, then she’s all gung-ho to start a girl band, then she’s suddenly ashamed to be seen with Lana, and now it’s compliments? Not to mention whatever that comment was about knickers? Lana’s going to get whiplash just trying to keep up. 

“Well, I have drama club on Thursdays, but otherwise I can practice after school. Only, um—I don’t know where we’ll play, because there’s not room at my apartment and you turn into a total bitch when your mom’s home.”

It just slips out. She doesn’t even mean to say it. Marina’s mouth drops open with shock, like Lana should be _sooo_ grateful for the company of someone from the upper social echelon that she doesn’t have basic standards for how she’s treated. She knows where she ranks in the social ladder. She doesn’t _care_. She’s not going to try and be someone she’s not for anyone’s sake, especially not Marina Diamandis’. No matter how cute her accent is. 

“That’s my aunt,” Marina says, and it takes Lana a minute to puzzle out what she means, it’s so different from the snotty comeback she was braced for. “Not my mam. She’s still back home, with my stepdad and Lafina. My sister.”

Lana’s not sure why Marina’s telling her this, but she’s acting like it’s relevant, so Lana nods like she understands. “So why’d you end up in California?”

Something flashes on Marina’s face, like a thunderhead rolling over her frankly ludicrous cheekbones, but she laughs, light and tinkling. “To get a record deal and become famous. Obviously.”

“Your Hollywood dreams provide context to the bitch problem, but don’t solve it,” Lana says, then takes a huge bite of her veggie hummus wrap, crunching loudly. The prettier and more poised Marina is, the more misfit and socially deviant Lana wants to feel. She knows it’s only a matter of time before Marina publicly rejects her—that’s what popular girls do. Their alliance right now only springs from the fact that none of Marina’s actual friends are dorky enough to enter the talent show. Lana’s not going to let herself forget it. Marina doesn’t actually _like_ her, and there’s no point pretending she does.

Marina bites her lower lip. Lana’s noticed the other girl can’t make lip gloss last more than 30 minutes. Her throat must be strawberry glitter all the way down. She looks so miserable, Lana worries she’s about to apologize. If Marina Diamandis apologizes to her, she will not be able to cope.

“Okay, we can try my place,” Lana says fast, before Marina says something she can’t take back. “But we’ll have to take the bus.”

Marina opens her mouth, probably to say something bratty, but one of her blond henchmen appears next to the table. Her mouth snaps shut. “Um, Marina? Did you get lost on the way to our table?” Ivy Klein asks. “I wouldn’t sit here unless you want Sylvia Plath to molest you.”

“One more word and I’ll put a hex on you,” Lana says. She starts arranging her french fries into a pentagram, glowering at Ivy.

“We were just planning for the talent show,” Marina says, neither defending Lana nor piling on, which is technically an improvement. “I’ll get my aunt to drive me. To be honest, like, I am _not_ taking the city bus with my keyboard. Tomorrow?”

“Ew, Reen, you can’t be _alone_ with her!” Ivy shudders theatrically. “I am going to _die_ of secondhand embarrassment if you really do this stupid talent show thing.”

“Don’t worry, Ivy, I’m pretty sure only a stake through the heart can kill you,” Lana says. She makes the sign of the cross in Ivy’s direction. “Back, bride of darkness! Beezlebub, I repel you!”

Ivy rolls her eyes so dramatically, it probably causes a brain hemorrhage. “Let’s go, Marina.” She grabs Marina by the upper arm. “You know what the sad thing is? You could be really pretty if you weren’t such a _freak_ ,” she hisses at Lana, and drags Marina away. Marina, of course, doesn’t even look back. Not that Lana wanted her to.

“Lizzy, phone for you!” Lana’s mom yells. The apartment’s small enough that a yell from the kitchen can be heard in every room. Privacy is not really possible.

Lana figures it’s her friend Hennie to ask about the physics homework, because literally no one else has ever called her in her entire life, so she is entirely unprepared when she picks up the phone to Marina’s stupid accent. “Who’s Lizzy?” Marina asks.

“I am,” says Lana. “But only my mom calls me that. Why are you calling?”

“How do you get Lizzy from Lana?”

“You don’t. My name is Elizabeth. You can’t use it.”

“Wait, did you change your name or something?”

“Since when are you so _interested_ in me?” Lana demands. She is not in the mood to deal with popular girl bullshit. She just wants to sit in her room, paint her nails, and write poetry. How can she write sad poems about being snubbed by Marina if Marina won’t leave her alone?

“I’m coming over today, remember? To practice? I need your address.”

Lana wishes she was dead already. “I have a headache,” she lies. “Today’s not going to work.”

“Have a tylenol,” Marina suggests, “and give me your address.”

And even though the last thing Lana wants is some perfect platinum-headed cheerleader in her bedroom tonight, when she opens her mouth to say so, her address falls out instead. “Brilliant!” Marina chirps on the other end of the line. “See you in a bit!”

Twenty minutes later, Marina and Lana are crammed together on Lana’s bed, because Marina’s keyboard takes up basically the entire rest of the room. They’re supposed to be coming up with their setlist, but honestly, Lana can barely remember what music _is_ with Marina this close to her, let alone specific songs she thinks they can learn and perform in a couple weeks.

“So definitely _To Your Love,_ ” Marina nods, writing the song title down on a notepad. She bites the end of the pen, displacing lip gloss as usual. Lana’s entire bedroom is going to smell like Marina’s mouth by the end of the night at this rate. “What else should we play?”

Lana would have an easier time stringing a sentence together if the other girl wasn’t 95% leg. Marina’s got shorts on, if three square inches of denim can fairly be called shorts, and a soft, oversized t-shirt tucked into them. Her legs are tanned gold and toned hard from cheer practice, and Lana would _really_ like to have something else to look at. She needs a bedroom 300% bigger if she’s going to be in it with Marina Diamandis.

“Ooh, what about Madonna? I have wanted to be Madonna since I was like, fifteen years old.” Marina’s like a perpetual motion machine. She doodles on the notepad, shifts her legs around to better fill up every inch of Lana’s bed, chews on the pen, gets excited and cries out random ideas about their performance. Thank god she doesn’t need Lana to say anything and can just keep herself going forever, because Lana’s brain stopped working for good when Marina decided to roll onto her belly and fling her legs over Lana’s lap. 

“Who did you want to be?” Marina asks, twisting around to poke Lana in the thigh with her gel pen. Lana tries to scoot further into the corner, away from the girl of ten thousand legs, but she’s already pressed against the wall.

“Nancy Sinatra,” Lana says, startled into saying something accurate.

“Who?”

Lana refuses to sing _Boots_ , because that’s all anyone knows from Nancy’s discography and she deserves better. She grabs her guitar, smacking it against Marina’s ankles none too gently, and starts picking out a tune. She’s not shy about singing—there’s no point in an apartment this small, where everyone hears everything—but it feels very intimate, singing something she likes so much to a girl on her bed. She closes her eyes as she starts to sing.

“ _Strawberries, cherries, and an angel’s kiss in spring, my summer wine is really made from all these things… Take off your silver spurs, help me pass the time, and I’ll give to you my summer wine…_ ”

When Lana opens her eyes again, Marina’s watching her with wide eyes and parted lips. “Wow. Lana. Your voice is _beautiful_. It sounds so sad.”

Lana feels heat sear up her neck, blood crashing against her thin skin. She puts the guitar down like it’s what burned her, not Marina’s gaze. But without the guitar between them, Marina scoots closer. She sits cross-legged in front of Lana, their knees touching like one of them is the girl, and the other is the reflection. Marina’s inner thighs peel open like lily petals, drawing Lana’s eye all the way to the narrow strip of shorts that barely cover—

Lana’s hand flutters over Marina’s leg before she can snatch it back. “Oh, you’re hurt,” she says, because beneath her hand Marina’s inner thigh is crosshatched with pink weals. 

Marina looks at her strangely. “Well, not anymore,” she says. “They’re just scars.”

“Not the kind of scar you get by accident,” Lana says, because apparently sitting on this bed with Marina has already used up all her self-control and now she’s just blurting out whatever stupid thing comes to mind.

Marina finally, _finally_ pulls her legs away. She swings them over the edge of the bed and squeezes them together, making the scars disappear between her perfect, muscular thighs. Lana doesn’t know what a girl like that has to bleed about. But then, Lana never really knows why she’s sad either. Lana never really knows why she’s making herself bleed either.

“It’s nothing,” Marina says, looking away. “Don’t tell anyone at school.”

Lana’s never bothered to hide any of her scars, so it doesn’t feel like a big deal to push up her sleeve and show Marina the one at the crook of her elbow. “Look, it’s not a big deal,” she says. She flips her arm over, showing off a few of the thin ones on the outer edge of her forearm. She pulls up her shirt, shows the pale white lines rising from the curve of her upper hip; pulls it higher, to show the thick yellow one between her lower ribs. Then she realizes how much of her naked torso she’s showing Marina right now—she can see her own pale skin reflected in Marina’s dark eyes—and lets the fabric drop, angry at herself for feeling embarrassed. “I won’t say anything.”

Marina’s got her arms crossed under her breasts, hugging herself tight. “Lana? Why did you tell my aunt we aren’t friends?”

Lana is taken completely off guard by this question. Isn’t it obvious? “Uh, because we’re not?”

“Well, why aren’t we? What do you call what we’re doing if we’re not friends?”

Lana blinks at Marina. She never thought Marina was stupid, but she’s acting like it. “I’m pretty sure this is you taking advantage of me. Like, you’ve been mean to me since you moved here, but now you suddenly want something from me, so, like, here you are. I mean, what do you call it?”

Marina, already so small at the edge of Lana’s bed, looks hurt. “ _Mean_ to you? I didn’t even _know_ you until a week ago!”

Lana knows girls like this, though. She knows how important it is to Marina that she believe in her own innocent, fundamental niceness. Girls like Marina are so pretty they never have to treat anyone well. Everyone just likes them anyway. And frankly, Lana is sick of her.

“Oh, so calling me a lesbian pervert and Vagina Woolf and whatever else you and your friends say about me—were those compliments? Should I have been _thanking_ you?” She hates the way her voice is shaking. Marina’s face is pale, her eyes shining with what had better fucking not be tears. “Don’t you dare cry. I’m the one who gets to cry about this—except you’re not _worth_ crying over.”

Silence stretches between them like a horrid taffy. Lana trembles with self-righteous rage and definitely, _definitely_ not regret. She has nothing to be sorry for. Marina is an awful girl and Lana never should have agreed to this. She doesn’t even know why she did. Why would she possibly want to spend time with someone like Marina?

“Should I—go?” Marina asks. Her voice is wobbly and wet, but to her credit, she does not dare to cry. “We don’t—obviously we won’t do the talent show since you hate me so much.”

“I said I’d do it,” Lana says sharply. In spite of everything, she doesn’t actually want the other girl to leave. Marina winces at the sound of her voice. For half a second Lana wishes she knew how to be nicer, wishes she was better at this. “But what we are isn’t friends.”

Marina’s cheeks are ruddy and she won’t meet Lana’s eyes, but that’s probably what you can expect when you chew somebody out. Lana doesn’t know: she’s never actually done it before.

Lana doesn’t know what else there is to say, but she’s not a big fan of scowling at someone trying not to cry, so she grabs her guitar again. She starts on chords of the Fiona Apple song Marina picked out. She’s not great at it, but she picks up speed as she goes. After a few verses, Marina gets off the bed and goes to her keyboard. Together they find the melody. Neither girl sings.

*

Lana del Rey turns out not to be a mystery after all. It’s actually really simple: Lana hates her. And Marina deserves it. Now that everyone’s clear on that, there’s really no need to discuss it.

That’s the philosophy Marina takes, anyway. And it seems like it’s working. Lana comes over two more times over the next week and a half, they settle on three songs for their 10 minutes onstage, and they get better at playing them. Singing together is harder. Their voices don’t harmonize easily, or they’re all out of sync: both soft when one should be strong, or both strong when one should be soft. They still have nearly two weeks til the show. Marina hopes it’s enough.

“Why _are_ you doing this, Reen?” Ivy asks her at the mall after school. She’s sipping a low-fat latte and skimming through sale racks at Banana Republic. 

Marina has asked herself this so. Many. Times. She doesn’t have a satisfactory answer.

“Did I tell you I did drama and stuff at my old school? You should see an all girls’ production of Hamlet, Ivy, or you haven’t really lived. Ooh, this is tidy.” Marina holds up a spangly turquoise dress, the kind of thin elastic cotton that clings close to the skin. She bets her boobs would look fantastic in it.

“You’ll look fat in that,” Ivy tells her. Marina has spent enough of her life at an all girls’ school to recognize that Ivy is punishing her for evading her question. Well, two can play at petty.

“Nah. It’ll be fine. I don’t have your hips,” Marina shoots back. Ivy’s eyes narrow meanly. “Can you get off my back about the talent show, Ives? I just want to. It would be nice if you would, like, _support_ me.”

Ivy pouts, pursing her raspberry-tinted lips. “I’m sorry,” she says in this cutesy baby voice. “Maybe I’m jealous of you? You’re so talented.” This is the making-up part, Marina knows. Going to girls’ schools was hell in a lot of ways, especially the part where she was the only one who thought what she felt was normal, when girls are so pretty and smell so good and they’re the only ones around to feel that way about, and then the violent figuring out you’re supposed to _hide that shit_ —but it has prepared her for American cheerleaders. Ivy Klein doesn’t scare her. None of her friends here do, and they’re the type of people who are used to being scary. They think she’s fearless, strong and carefree; but actually she just has much bigger things to be scared of than high school girls. Things like getting caught. 

Marina hooks her arm through Ivy’s and leads her toward the dressing room. “This dress is coming home with me,” she prophecies.

It’s when they’re crammed into a little dressing room, under unflattering fluorescents, stripped down to underwear and hopping into various pairs of skinny jeans, that Ivy resumes her offense. “Don’t bite my head off if I say something, okay?”

“Depends what you say.” Marina likes Ivy a whole lot, but that doesn’t mean she trusts her.

“It’s about Lana,” she says. Marina’s stomach sinks. She checks herself in the mirror surreptitiously, like what’s wrong with her is something you can see from the outside. Marina spends a lot of time in the mirror studying her facial expressions, her posture, the way she moves. Trying to do it like everyone else. Trying to make sure she doesn’t give herself away. But it’s all for nothing if Ivy’s seen through her anyway.

“What about Lana?” Marina asks slowly. She tries to seem like her heart isn’t thrumming under her skin like it’s about to burst. Casual. Like she doesn’t care. Like she’s not hiding anything.

“I just don’t know if you’re safe with her.” Ivy’s in this lacy magenta bra and tiny stone-washed designer jeans, her sea-green eyes wide and sparkling with sincerity and glitter eyeshadow. Marina rolls her eyes, but Ivy grabs her bare shoulder. Her fingernails bite sharp. “I mean it!” Ivy says, but her voice is going nasty around the edges, like spoiling milk. “She tried to have sex with Jules Lewis at a sleepover.”

“Ivy, _stop_ _it_.”

“It’s true! You can ask Jules. They used to be best friends, then Lana like, _assaulted_ her. That’s why she has like no friends.” 

Marina doesn’t know how to evaluate any of this rationally, because she’s too busy being gut-punched. This is probably exactly how people talked about her at her old school. This is the kind of shit she moved across an ocean to get away from. _You just need a new start,_ her mam said, not asking. _To have a normal high school experience, somewhere none of this can follow you. You just need to leave it behind_. Like it wasn’t part of Marina, some deep rot inside her that can’t be cut out. Like she could leave it on the runway when her plane took off, like it would stick to the continent and not the girl.

Ivy’s eyebrows are hitched high on her forehead. “Unless you’re, you know,” she says, taking her hand off Marina’s shoulder to put it protectively over the top of her boobs, like Marina is suddenly going to start gawking at her or something. “Into that?” Marina’s blood vessels begin to emit a high-pitched shriek like a tea kettle. Panic. This is panic.

“No! No,” Marina says, too fast. She looked amazing in this dress a minute ago, but now her reflection looks voluptuous and obscene and _sad_. Straight girls don’t look like they’re trying this hard. “You’re right, I totally get a creepy vibe from her.”

“Oh my god, does she like, _look_ at you?” Ivy asks, gleeful, approving. 

Marina’s heart rate slows a little, but the panic just dumps into her stomach and fills her with nausea. “Yeah, sometimes. It’s so gross,” she lies. She pulls the dress off as fast as she can, like she can strip off guilt as easily. She has to protect herself, doesn’t she? And it’s not like Lana’s reputation can get any worse. Right? 

“Yuck. People like that shouldn’t be allowed to go to school with normal people, it’s not safe,” Ivy says. She hands Marina her shirt like suddenly it’s back to completely casual, being half-naked in a tiny room together. “So are you really set on doing this talent show thing with her? Even though she’s, like, a predator?”

Marina bites her lip. She’s back in her own clothes, but she still doesn’t like her reflection. “Well, I don’t want to be homophobic,” she says. She knows exactly how stupid it sounds. It’s like she can’t stop herself. “So yeah. It’s just a couple more weeks. Then I’m sure she’ll never talk to me again.”

“Good,” Ivy says emphatically. “Okay, I’ll be more supportive. I just had to make sure you weren’t, like, a lesbo creep. And you have to get that dress. You looked really sexy in it.”

Marina is so battered by the confusing barrage of women’s heterosexuality coming off Ivy right now that she doesn’t know what to do, other than buy the horrible shame dress and follow Ivy to the mall food court. She feels like a kicked dog, except the only person kicking her is her. “I shouldn’t get a pretzel,” Ivy says longingly as they pass Auntie Anne’s. “You were totally right about my hips.”

Marina does talk to Jules Lewis. The thought of it makes her feel sick to her stomach even as she obsesses about doing it, like pulling on a really big scab that’s still attached in the middle, bloody and revolting and irresistible. In the end, it’s a crime of passion. She’s resolved not to ask, but then she sees Jules in the library and before she knows what she’s doing, she’s following Jules down an aisle of reference books. 

“Hey, it’s Jules, right?” Marina whispers, cramming too close to the other girl’s space over by the encyclopedias.

Jules is used to everyone knowing her, though. She’s one of those student government kids, so her face is regularly on fliers around the school and she does announcements over the loudspeaker in the mornings. She seems unperturbed by having an encyclopedia stalker. “Yes, and you’re Marina Diamandis, new this year from Wales,” Jules rattles off. Great, Marina thinks: a know-it-all. If this is Lana’s type, no wonder she’s so disdainful of Marina and her cheerleader friends.

“I have something kind of personal to ask you,” Marina whispers in a rush, before she can lose her nerve. Jules starts to look uncomfortable, her eyes darting past Marina like she’s scoping out her escape route, but Marina barrels on. “About Lana del Rey?”

“What about her?”

“Um—we’ve been spending some time together lately, working on something for the talent show? And I wanted to know—” There’s no way to say it that doesn’t make her sound like a horrible gossip, so she just goes for it— “what happened between the two of you.”

“Oh.” Jules stares at the encyclopedia in her hands. “I don’t exactly feel great about it. We stopped being friends because she was making me really uncomfortable, I guess.”

Marina’s a little shocked. Somehow she thought Ivy must have been exaggerating, or at least that Jules wouldn’t just come out and say it. She didn’t really believe what Ivy said was _true_. It’s a feeling of thin ice: whatever people at this school think about Lana, they’d think that about Marina too, if they knew. Marina braces herself for impact. “Uncomfortable how?”

Jules is looking anywhere but at Marina’s eyes. “Just—being around her was getting kind of scary. With—the way she is.”

“The way she is,” Marina echoes. Her guts fold themselves into origami. She can taste breakfast burning in the back of her throat, coating her tongue in bile.

Jules looks up urgently, suddenly jolting into eye contact. “I mean, of course I know it isn’t her fault! Like, she didn’t ask for it, she can’t help it. I just think she should get treatment for it. That’s what I told her. That I didn’t want to just sit there and watch her get worse and worse when, you know, doctors can treat that kind of stuff. I wanted her to have a normal life, be the person she used to be before she started getting… sick. So when Lana said she wouldn’t go to therapy to get it fixed, I told her… I told her I didn’t want to see her anymore.”

Jules looks profoundly miserable, but she’s got nothing on how Marina feels. She doesn’t know what would have happened if her family had forced her to get treatment, to go to one of those places that does electroshock until you’re so full of pain it’s easier to live brainwashed than keep fighting. Her family _helped_ her. They sent her away, but like, so she could start over. Get away from the bullying and the rumors, forget about Caitrin, start over and have a proper life. They trusted her to ‘fix’ herself, basically. No lobotomy required. Good girls can learn to hide it all on their own.

Marina didn’t dare say it—all she really could say was _I’m sorry, I’m so sorry_ —but a fresh start feels like a punishment all the same. She misses home so fucking much. 

“Thanks,” she manages to say to Jules. 

Jules looks really worried now. “Is she talking about me? What’s she saying? Is she still mad?” she asks. But Marina can’t catch her breath. She can’t speak. All she can do is smile and shake her head. An empty girl with a forbidden world buried inside.

The more time she spends with Lana, the worse she has to talk about her to her friends. It’s like an undiscovered law of thermodynamics or something. Worse, the more she _likes_ spending time with Lana, the more obvious it probably is. Like the truth is shining out through her skin like a captive star. Like anyone can tell from looking at her face what she’s harboring within. As she grows more paranoid, she overcompensates by talking even more shit about Lana to her friends. And then goes ahead and spends _even more time with her_ , like an absolute prat.

But the biggest problem is that Marina is having a _really good time_ hanging out with Lana. They go over to each other’s houses almost every day after cheer practice, and play songs for the talent show or of their own invention, tangle together on the couch to watch nonsense TV, cook whatever vegan food they can scrape together out of her aunt’s bachelor fridge (it’s usually a concoction based around tortilla chips), or try on costumes and makeup styles and invent whole new girls they can pretend to be. Marina feels happier than she has all year. She catches herself looking forward to seeing Lana each day, finding excuses more and more often to go bother her at lunch. She starts to think about what it is they are to each other, since Lana made it so clear they aren’t friends. She starts smelling her pillow after Lana lies on it. She starts feeling like she hasn’t felt since Caitrin. Since Wales.

Marina is so completely fucked.

Tonight Lana’s sprawled across Marina’s bed and they’re not even pretending to practice for the show. She has her arms flung out and her eyes are closed, and Marina’s idly braiding the other girl’s hair. Marina could make her own atlas outlining how and where girls can touch girls, with lines like the Tropic of Lesbian that demarcate where you mustn’t cross unless you’re prepared for everyone at your entire school to freak out because they think you’re gay. Marina’s fingers glide through Lana’s lovely chestnut hair and she wonders where she’d place the Equator, how she’d mark it. It’s dangerous, looking at Lana’s prone body and thinking thoughts like that. Marina never used to think of herself as dangerous, but now she’s the part of the atlas that’s dark and obscured, labeled _Here There Be Monsters_. She’s cursed and uncharted. She aches for discovery.

She realizes Lana’s eyes are open and doesn’t know how long the other girl’s been watching her. She hopes her eyes haven’t lingered too long or too obviously on the soft curves of Lana’s body, the pale skin that peeks out from under all those layers of black, the rippling shine of her dark hair with its hidden gold.

“That feels nice,” Lana says, her voice blissy and relaxed, and it could mean something or it could mean nothing. The secret to surviving this much time with Lana is not allowing herself to interpret anything. Lana stretches her arms over her head, revealing a strip of stomach skin. Marina imagines Lana’s clothes riding up, revealing a topography contoured with isolines. She will add Lana’s navel to the atlas, label it as a magnetic pole because of the way it drags her eyes.

Then Lana flings her arm towards Marina’s wall and says, “Wait, _what_ is that?” She rises to her knees, all that long hair slipping through Marina’s fingers like so much water, and studies a picture Marina has tacked to the corkboard on the wall over her bed. Lana brushes other papers and pictures out of the way to see the whole thing. Marina’s stomach sinks when she sees what picture it is. She doesn’t even know why she put it there. It’s not like she wants to remember.

“Is this your natural hair color?” Lana asks. The picture shows Marina and Caitrin in their school uniforms, smiling in front of their dormitory, its ancient brick walls mossy and lush behind them. The whole photo pops with green, the wet and lurid way Wales is always growing, and their big stupid grins shine out. Marina remembers when it was taken, remembers thinking she couldn’t possibly be happier. Caitrin’s arm is around her shoulder and, unseen in the picture, Marina’s fingertips are tucked into Caitrin’s skirt at the small of her back. They were rooming together for the fifth year in a row. They were going to be best friends forever. They’d started kissing each other after lights’ out last year, written steamy letters all summer. They were in love and no one knew their secret.

In the picture, Marina’s hair is long, tumbling past her shoulders in waves of a dense, inky black much darker than Lana’s. She looks like herself in a way that surprises her. She tries not to think about who she used to be, who she used to look like. “You look so pretty,” Lana’s saying. “When did you decide to dye it?”

Marina leans into the zone designated as Lanaspace and pushes the other papers back into place, hiding Caitrin’s face. “When I moved here,” she says. “I kind of wanted to change everything about myself that I could.”

Lana nods like that makes perfect sense. “Elizabeth Woolridge Grant,” she says in her dreamy-low voice.

“What?”

“My name. Before I changed it. I’m saying I understand.” Lana shoves the other pictures aside again so she can look Caitrin in the eye. “So who’s the girl?”

Sometimes Marina has this problem where she can’t tell if they’re talking about what they’re talking about or if there’s another conversation going on. It _feels_ like there’s a lot riding on her answer. But maybe it only feels that way because she wants it to?

Marina takes a risk, then. She doesn’t do that a lot. She can feel her heartbeat in her tongue as she says, “Caitrin. My ex… um, ex-best friend. It, um. I think it was a kind of like the situation you had with Jules?”

Lana gives her a strange look. Of course she does: they’ve never spoken about Jules. Marina gnaws her entire bottom lip at once. 

“You heard about that?” Lana asks.

Marina’s neck feels hot. She goes all splotchy when she blushes. She nods. “Ivy,” she says, and it’s explanation enough.

Lana twists her fingers together like she’s trying to break them. “God, I bet you guys have a great time talking about me. Ivy Klein takes my continued existence very personally.”

Marina squirms, literally and figuratively, like a worm on a hook. It’s not like she can deny it. Like two hours ago at cheer practice, Lana was reading Anne Sexton up in the bleachers, and when she waved at Marina, instead of waving back Marina turned to Ivy and Tess and groaned, “Ugh, she’s totally like, _flirting_ with me,” and Tess giggled back, “Lesbian del Rey has the hots for you! Grooooss!” and Ivy pretended to gag.

Marina does not feel great about it.

Lana sighs and goes on, “Okay, so, if it was like what happened with Jules… Caitrin dropped you because you were depressed?”

“Wait, what?” Marina’s thoughts squeal like a tape rewinded too fast. _Depressed_? But she heard—Jules said—

Jules said she wanted Lana to get treatment for what was wrong with her. Marina plays the conversation back in her head and realizes that, in fact, Jules never said _what_ was wrong with Lana. So they totally could have been talking about depression the entire time. Bloody hell.

“Based on the look on your face,” Lana says quietly, “that’s not what Ivy told you? You shouldn’t believe everything you hear.”

“I’m a twat,” Marina says. “I’m sorry.”

Lana shakes her head. Her lips are a thin, stressed-out line. The ease between them has stretched out taut like a rubber band. Marina braces and braces and braces for the inevitable _snap_. When she speaks, Lana’s voice is small. ”I wish you didn’t all talk about me.”

Marina’s heart caves in. “You don’t get it,” she says, suddenly trying not to cry. “I have to.” She likes Lana so _much_. It’s dangerous, it’s bad for her, Lana’s not even _like_ her, she needs to stop. She has already learned about herself that she isn’t going to stop. She can’t let anyone think she has anything in common with the rumors about Lana. Even if it turns out the rumors aren’t even true.

“You’re right. I don’t get it.” Lana sighs, and picks up her guitar, even though the only thing she should be doing right now is leaving. Marina is such an asshole: she can’t stand Lana acting like that’s okay, like she doesn’t expect or deserve any better. “So do you still want to tell me about Caitrin, or are we going to play?”

“Let’s just play,” Marina says, miserable. She gets off the bed and heads for her keyboard.

“Hey, Marina?” Lana’s voice freezes her in place.

“Yeah?”

“I think I’d like you better as a brunette.”

*

The talent show is a week from today, and tonight Marina is coming over to practice. Lana is cleaning and re-cleaning the apartment, even though Marina’s seen it before, knows it’s not fancy like the house she shares with her aunt. She feels nervous and she’s not sure why. Maybe because there’s only a week left to their working partnership, and she knows they’re running out of time before they go back to being enemies. Maybe because it’s a Friday, and Marina’s never given up a popular kid holy day for Lana before.

Maybe because her stomach gets tight, something in her chest starts to struggle, and her fingertips to her toes erupt into tingles anytime Marina gets near. Maybe because Marina has a secret and Lana knows what it is. Maybe because it’s Lana’s secret too. (If it even counts as a secret when everyone at school already says it about you.)

Maybe because the last time they hung out, Lana’s pretty sure Marina almost said it out loud. And if that’s possible, maybe anything is.

She’s even dressed up, for some values of ‘dressed up.’ She has her favorite pajamas on: soft flannel pants that cling just so around her thighs and butt, a snug black t-shirt with her favorite record label’s logo across the chest, and a little gap between where the two meet. Even though it’s pajamas, she feels sexy and kissable. She even has lipgloss on, in a wild Marina-inspired gesture that she is mortified to think of Marina noticing. She just has a _feeling_ about tonight. It makes her belly twist just thinking about it.

So you can imagine her disappointment when Marina calls and cancels at the last minute.

“I’m sorry, Lana, but something came up,” she says over the phone.

Lana bites her lip, exactly like Marina does, flooding her mouth with the taste of lip gloss. Exactly like Marina’s mouth tastes. “I already put our frozen pizza in the oven,” she says, and even to her it sounds plaintive. 

In the background, Lana can hear other voices, high and petty like birds. Marina’s not alone, then. Her evil clones are there too. 

“It’s a Friday, you know?” Marina says. “There’s this party I forgot I said I’d go to.”

“Well, tell your friends you’re busy. The show is in a week, we need to practice.”

“No, you’re right, I just can’t get out of it. Why don’t I come over after the party?”

Lana hears someone she’s pretty sure is Ivy Klein crowing in the background. She feels like the punchline of a joke, the girl in a rom com you’re only nice to so you can win a bet. The thing about Lana, though, is that feeling like shit has never once made her want to back down.

“It will be way too late to play our instruments if you come over _after_ a party,” she says furiously. “If you want to come over, just tell Ivy no for once and come over. And if you don’t want to—just _say_ _so_.” 

“It’s not because of _Ivy_ ,” Marina says, only she’s whispering all of a sudden, so it definitely is. “God, you’re being such a freak! I said I was sorry, okay?” That part, of course, is at normal volume.

“I can’t even believe you right now,” Lana mutters. She’s so fucking mad, but it’s mostly at herself. What did she think they were going to do, eat vegan pizza and make almond milkshakes and stay up all night giggling? She pulls her shirt down where it keeps riding up. Stupid pajamas. Stupid Lana. 

“Wait! I just had an idea. Lana, come with us.”

“What?” Lana says, and she hears one of Marina’s friends in the background echoing her in the exact same incredulous tone.

“Yes! Lana, you have to! It’s brilliant. That way we can spend time together, and I can do the stupid party thing, and then after you can sleep over at my aunty’s. We can practice all night in the basement, she’ll never hear us.”

This is the worst idea Lana has ever heard, and she opens her mouth to say so, except what comes out is, “All right. I’ll ask my mom if I can borrow the car.”

Marina cheers, and starts chattering happily about what a lush plan it is (whatever that means), and Lana just stares at herself in her own bedroom mirror in abject disgust. She’s perfected the scornful eyebrow and she’s not above using it on herself. “You absolute moron,” she mouths at her reflection. Because like: what is she even _thinking_? She doesn’t go to parties, and she definitely doesn’t go to parties _with cheerleaders_. But she’s been looking forward to seeing Marina all day. Even if it’s not the night she imagined, even if it doesn’t mean anything, even if they aren’t even really friends—it’s better than not seeing Marina at all, isn’t it?

That, and. _Sleepover_. 

“Oh, and El?” Marina says. Lana’s never been called El by anyone, isn’t sure if she likes it. But everything is delicious from Marina’s tongue.

“Yes?”

“Wear something cute.”

Lana can’t even hear the dial tone. Her heart’s beating that loud.

Okay, confession: Lana has no idea what you’re supposed to wear to a high school party. Or what Marina thinks she looks cute in. She didn’t know Marina thought about her and cute in the same sentence until two minutes ago. She wants to do it right, which makes her annoyed with herself. And she feels exasperated that every single thing in her closet is _black_.

Lana finally settles on a lacy bustier with a cardigan over it and tight black jeans. She looks pretty, she thinks. She brushes out her hair and puts on a black velvet headband, then blackens her eyes with glitter liner and puts on more lip gloss. Either pretty, or totally stupid. She definitely looks one of those two things.

Lana drives herself to the party and parks down the street. Cars she recognizes from the school parking lot are everywhere, in the grass and crowding the street. She starts to feel a little sweaty with nerves. She didn’t think this part through. Is she just going to walk in like she belongs there, pour herself a sticky plastic cup of beer, and chat up the classmates who haven’t been nice to her since the sixth grade? She should be at Hennie’s house watching Miyazaki movies and eating almond milk ice cream and painting each fingernail a different brand of black polish to see if she can tell the difference, like she does every single other Friday of her life.

God, she wishes Hennie was here. She wishes she’d arranged to meet up somewhere with Marina. She wishes she didn’t have to walk in there alone.

A rap on the car window scares her so badly she screams. She cranks the window down a few inches and Marina grins at her. “I think that’s my cardigan,” Marina says instead of hello.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Lana complains. She lifts her arm and sniffs the cardigan near the elbow. “Doesn’t smell like you. It must be mine.”

“And what do I smell like?” Marina laughs, crooking an eyebrow. Lana hopes it’s too dark for Marina to see her blush.

She gets out of the car before she can embarrass herself further, stuffing her mom’s keys in her back pocket. “Okay, so where’s this party?”

Marina looks her up and down approvingly. “Whoa, is that lace see-through? I didn’t think you had it in you, del Rey, but you look _hot._ ”

Lana’s belly squirms with things she’d rather not be feeling. She crosses her arms over her chest, holding the cardigan shut over the bustier she totally should not have worn. The tops of her boobs feel cold. Clothes are supposed to cover those. Why did she come to a party in what basically amounts to underwear?

Marina snakes her hand between Lana’s body and her crossed arms, linking their arms together. She pets Lana’s arm and giggles. “I’m so excited you came out with us,” she says happily. “You should’ve seen the look on Ivy’s face! She’s so pissed at me.”

Maybe it’s the way she stretches out the _sooo_. Maybe it’s the giggling. Maybe it’s that Marina Diamandis just called her hot. But Lana realizes with a jolt what’s going on. “Marina, are you _drunk_?”

“‘Course I am. It’s a party, innit?” Marina’s eyes are just a little glassy, her cheeks flushed strawberry pink, her accent thicker than it usually is. Her lips part, showing just the bottoms of her teeth. Lana wants to not want.

Drunk Marina leads her up to the party, like showing up arm-in-arm with the school’s resident spooky (alleged) lesbian is no big deal, and doesn’t seem to notice everyone staring at them. Maybe girls as pretty as Marina always get stared at like this.

“I’ve never done this before,” Lana confesses as Marina marches her through a crowd of people who look at them with open incredulity. Drunk Marina is easier to talk to, or Lana decides to act like she is, because there’s no way she can get through tonight with her usual level of tongue-tiedness around Marina.

“What, get pissed?” Marina has led her into the kitchen of this expensive-looking house. She clears a space among bottles and beer cans and hops up onto the counter, not seeming to care how high her skirt hikes. Marina’s wearing a crop sweater that shows miles of tanned skin from the bottom of her rib cage to the hollows of her hips, and suddenly it’s right in Lana’s eyeline. She leans over the mess of bottles, biting a fingernail thoughtfully, and baring every oblique muscle she has.

“No, I meant, um. Going to a party.”

Marina’s mouth drops open as she bartends, swirling an ominous concoction of liquors together into matching Solo cups. “But that’s the only thing anyone ever does here!” Marina protests. “Are you just too cool for all of it?”

“No, I—” Lana bites her tongue to stop herself from being too honest, then remembers she decided she can talk to drunk Marina. “I’ve never been invited.”

Marina takes a sip out of a cup, blanches slightly, and then passes it to Lana. Lana tries not to be too obvious as she fits her lips to the same place where Marina’s were and drinks. “Oh _wow_ ,” she coughs. “This tastes like cleaning spray.”

Marina’s eyes water a little as she takes a big gulp of her own. “I never really drank before I moved here. You drink wine and cider and whatever in the summer, when you’re home with your family, but my school’s really strict and I’m a teetotaller all year. So I’m not sure if it’s supposed to taste like this?”

“I hope not.” Lana gasps a little after a second, larger sip. She sets her hand on the counter near Marina’s, and like it’s nothing, Marina shifts so their fingers overlap, then interlaces them.

“Well, gets the job done anyhow,” says Marina, looking carefully at their linked hands. “Why don’t people invite you to parties? You’re really cool.”

Lana’s face feels hot and buzzy already from whatever Marina’s mixed for them. Her lips tingle like kissing. Like how she imagines kissing. “Your friend Ivy hasn’t told you?” she asks pettishly, but she regrets the bitter words as soon as she says them.

Marina squeezes her hand, because this is happening: they’re alone in the middle of a crowded room, Marina’s skirt is pushed so high Lana knows she’s wearing light green underwear, and Marina is holding Lana’s hand. “Ivy’s such a bitch,” she sighs.

“You’re the one who hangs out with her.”

“Not tonight,” Marina says, grinning at her. “Tonight I’m with you.”

Lana doesn’t know what to say, so she takes a huge sip of her drink. It tastes like there’s gin _and_ tequila in here, but god, no one would put those in the same drink on purpose. Unless Marina thinks all clear liquor tastes the same? Lana’s whole body shudders at the flavor, or maybe that’s not the reason she’s shaking.

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Marina says, jumping off the counter and dragging Lana by the hand. “Run!” Tripping and sloshing their drinks, they run out of the kitchen. Marina keeps her head down and doesn’t stop dragging Lana past people and rooms until they duck into a dark doorway and Marina slams the door shut behind them.

“Why are we running?” Lana laughs, breathless. There’s no light in this room but what comes through the window. The streetlight outside shows a messy bedroom with car posters on the wall and an unmade bed. Lana’s spent lots of time in bedrooms with Marina over the last month, but for some reason her rabbiting heart and over-sensitive skin are convinced this time is different.

“I had to hide from Jack,” Marina says, like it’s obvious. Her eyes are wide with innocence and mascara. She takes a slug out of her cup and slams it down on the cluttered dresser. “Empty! I win.”

Lana’s cup is still half full. This stuff is disgusting, and _strong_. She doesn’t know how long Marina’s been drinking like this, but she hopes the other girl knows what she’s doing. “Okay… so why did you have to hide from Jack?”

Marina shakes her head. “Because he wants me to _go out_ with him! He always corners me at parties, Lana, it’s _terrible_.”

Lana’s whole mouth is full of heartbeat. She swallows hard. “You don’t want to go out with Jack? He seems, like, perfect for you.”

Marina’s beautiful even when she grimaces. “Ugh, I don’t know. I just don’t really want to date boys, you know?”

Lana opens her mouth and then closes it again, because there are too many ways to say _I really do know_ and she can’t get any of them out.

Marina takes a step closer, her eyes all black but for the glitter of captured light. Lana’s too afraid to move, so she blinks in slow motion. Marina tilts her chin up, looks slightly down at Lana. This close, Lana can smell her lip gloss. Can almost taste it. There’s not even room for a breath between them, that’s how close Marina is. Lana can feel the heat of Marina’s body pulling her in like the edge of a cliff.

“Don’t,” Marina breathes into the space between their mouths. “You’re going to ruin everything.”

That’s when the door bursts open and Ivy Klein, Mara Lucas, and Tess Contreras spill in. Lana leaps back so fast she spills cold, burning alcohol down the lace of her shirt. “DATE RAPE ALERT! Thank god we got here in time!” Mara shrieks, and throws her arms around Marina, drunk and laughing. Marina catches her, letting out a whoop of delight, and joins in the laughter.

But Lana doesn’t think anything’s very funny. Her stomach has dropped out. Her heart is racing cold and deadly, an entirely different type of dizzy than before. She feels like an endangered animal, stinking with fear. These girls didn’t come here to be nice to her. And who knows what they think they saw? She sets her cup down carefully on the dresser by Marina’s. Letting her guard down, letting herself drink, was a mistake.

“We saw you disappear into a bedroom with, um,” Tess stalls out as she clearly fails to think of a mean name for Lana. Lana doesn’t know where her imagination is failing: names of women writers, or ruder words for _dyke_. “Her.”

“Oh, we were just hiding from Jack,” Marina says, oblivious to the danger. Her cheeks might be pinker than before, but it’s hard to tell in the dark. She tucks her hair behind her ear like nothing ever happened. Maybe it didn’t.

“Is that what Lana said to get you by yourself?” Ivy asks. “It’s not smart to be alone with her, Marina. Especially if you’re drinking.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Lana snaps. She doesn’t know why she came to this dumb party, but it wasn’t for this. “I am so fucking tired of listening to you talk, Ivy Klein.”

“Hey! Whoa! Be nice,” Marina says, and of _course_ it’s Lana she says it to. She reaches for Lana’s arm but Lana jerks away from her touch. What the fuck else was she expecting? It doesn’t matter who Marina acts like when it’s just the two of them. This is who Marina _is_. 

“So I have to be nice, and she doesn’t?” Lana shakes her head so hard the world blurs. “Whatever, Marina. You’re just the same as they are. Some dumb blond bubblegum _bitch_.”

Marina’s face registers the hurt. “Lana,” she protests, and for a second Lana thinks she’ll apologize, or explain what she brought Lana to this dark bedroom for, or— “You’re my ride home. Don’t leave without me, okay?”

Lana lets out the longest exhalation in recorded history, trying to calm herself down. Her eyes burn, which is funny, because she doesn’t remember giving herself permission to cry about this shit. “Fine,” she bites out. “But I’m not staying in here.”

With her eyes this full of tears she refuses to shed, the party is just an aquatic blur. She finds herself a nice, smeary corner and throws herself onto someone’s extremely plush couch as far away from Marina as possible, and she does. Not. Cry.

It tells you everything you need to know about Lana’s social life than no one even tries to talk to her. Not even Marina, even though Lana sees her a few times, passing through with Ivy to get drink refills, stopping to talk to various people, once dancing to the obnoxious house music til she’s out of breath and visibly flushed. Not a word to Lana. Certainly not an apology.

She sits there for two hours, picking at the hole in the sleeve of the cardigan—Lana’s black cardigan doesn’t have a tear, so actually this one probably is Marina’s—and drinking plastic cups of room-temperature sprite and reading a Charlotte Perkins-Gilman collection she found on one of the built-in living room shelves. It’s not an uplifting read, but Lana’s never had much use for cheerfulness. 

Even as she waits, loyal as a dog, she wonders why she’s doing it. What _is_ it about Marina that gets her stuck like this? What exactly does she think is happening here? But Lana is exhausted of everything, including herself. She doesn’t have answers to these questions.

By twelve-thirty, Lana needs to relocate, because all the couches have turned into dry-hump platforms for drunk teenagers. She drifts through the house with her book and her sickly-sweet Sprite, feeling like she’s not even there. She tries to use the bathroom, but even in there, some football player has a girl pushed up against the shower door. Odds are climbing that Lana will have contracted surface-contact chlamydia by the time she leaves this party.

Lana starts checking bedrooms next. “Get out of here, creep!” one of her charming classmates slurs at her from underneath some grunting boy. It sucks, everything about this sucks, and Lana is forced to admit she’s not looking for someplace to read quietly and wait for teen pregnancy to blossom all around her. She’s looking for Marina.

Finally, in the basement, a bleach-blond with smeared eye makeup straddles some random popular guy on a couch. Marina breaks off kissing him with a wet suction pop and smiles, her face a bit slack with alcohol. “Lana!” she cries. “I was looking for you.”

Lana looks from the guy’s lap to Marina and back again. It’s a distance of .03 inches. “You’re not going to find me there. Come on, it’s time to get out of here.”

Marina shakes her head. Everything about her makes Lana’s heart hurt. “No, that’s what I was gonna tell you,” she says, and Lana can hear how drunk she is from her flat slurry voice. “You can leave without me. I only told you to stay ‘cuz I thought we’d make out.” Marina hiccups enormously. “Make up, I mean.”

“Marina—”

But the gross dude leans his head back over the couch to look at Lana upside down. “She said you can go, Looney del Rey.”

Heat flares through Lana’s chest. Everyone at this school is a fucking pun fanatic. She wants to leave. She is burning and dying and begging to leave. But she can’t leave Marina, not this drunk, not with some handsy guy who sounds perfectly sober. Not when she said she’d stay, and drive Marina home.

Before she can decide what to say, though, Marina’s talking again. “Matt, have you ever heard Lana sing?”

“My name’s Josh,” the guy protests.

Marina flaps her boneless hand at him. “Pretty sure it’s Matt. You gotta hear this girl. She’s amazing. My eyes stop working when she sings. Or, or start working for the first time. She makes you see _galaxies_. The whole cosmos. Like her voice is starlight in a vacuum, and you didn’t know you were empty til she lit you up.”

“You’re drunk,” Matt/Josh says. “Let’s get back to—”

And he’s moving in to kiss her when Marina lets out a sudden, rancid burp. Her eyes go wide, her cheeks suddenly bloodless. She looks down at the boy she’s using as a bench and throws up into his lap.

“If you throw up in my mom’s car, I am going to skin you alive,” Lana warns, braking with excessive slowness as they creep up to a stop sign. After watching the entire contents of Marina’s flat stomach flash-flood all over that dude, she figures there’s no such thing as too careful. 

“Do you like kissing?” Marina asks. The words have soft edges in her drunk mouth. “ _I_ like kissing. Matt wasn’t very good at it. I bet you’re better. Girls usually are.” Marina hiccups, and they both freeze, waiting to see if vomit follows. When it doesn’t, Lana slo-o-o-owly accelerates away from the stop sign. 

“Well, I don’t kiss girls with barf breath, so forget about it,” Lana frowns. “What the hell were you doing tonight? You could have gotten really hurt. Who knows what that guy would have done to you if you’d passed out.”

Marina, completely useless, zeroes in on the one part of the sentence Lana does not wish to comment further upon. “You do kiss girls, though?”

Lana turns the next corner a lot less gently. Marina wobbles and lets out a sick little moan, which Lana feels she deserves. “I’m not having this conversation with you. You’ll just go make fun of me with your friends.”

Marina sighs tragically and presses her forehead against the passenger window. “I should have stood up for you tonight, with Ivy. I felt really bad about it after. S’why I got so drunk.”

“You should have stood up for me _ever_.” Lana’s feeling way more hurt than she’s okay with. Whatever happened with Marina tonight—the way Marina was staring at her mouth, leaning closer and closer, whispering _don’t_ —has got her all fucked up. “It’s whatever, okay? It’s not like we’re friends.” 

“No, that’s not what we are at all, is it?” Marina’s voice is strange, but maybe it’s just all the drinking and puking. “Caitrin wasn’t my friend either. Like you. She was more.”

Lana doesn’t know what she can possibly say to that. She reaches out and turns on the radio, twists the volume knob. They listen to whatever’s on the radio. It’s better than having to talk.

If going to a party with Marina was a mistake, Lana’s going to need a new word to describe spending the night at Marina’s house. She tries to drop her off in the driveway, but Marina is shivering. She’s got puke dried into the ends of her hair. She has the huge, sad eyes of those homeless dogs in animal shelter commercials.

“Are you going to leave me?” she asks through chattering teeth.

And she’s just so pathetic, Lana can’t say no.

She rationalizes, as she helps drag-walk Marina into the house. Like, clearly this girl is not all right. What if she falls down in the shower? What if she’s got alcohol poisoning and has a seizure in the night and it’s Lana’s fault for leaving her alone? Not to mention what her parents will do to her if she shows up at home at 3am smelling like liquor and puke. Really, staying at Marina’s is the only reasonable option.

Uh-huh. Right.

Lana has a harder time rationalizing how she ends up in Marina’s bed. She suspects it’s because she wants to.

“Don’t be silly,” Marina says, kicking apart the pillow-and-blanket nest Lana’s making on the floor. “My bed’s big enough for both of us. I was rotten to you all night, I’m not letting you sleep on the floor too.”

Instead of protesting like a sensible person, what Lana says is, “Fine. But you’re showering first. You’ve got a vomit crust.”

This makes matters worse, though, because Marina grabs Lana’s hand and drags her into the bathroom with her, saying “You have to make sure I don’t hit my head.” Lana leans against the wall and plays with the fuzz on the bathroom rug. She does not look at the silhouette of Marina’s body through the shower curtain. Marina sings softly, her voice fading in and out of the running water. She’s so beautiful, Lana thinks, and then scowls at herself. The song Marina’s singing is from their talent show set, and Lana figures she needs a distraction from her own thoughts, so she joins in on the chorus. Together they sing “ _My whole life is like a picture of a sunny day_ ” and their voices twist naturally into one another, with none of their usual awkwardness. By the end of the song, they aren’t quiet anymore: they’re singing at top volume, their voices big enough to contain each other, to melt and surge and entwine. Lana’s whole chest echoes with resonance, and in the sudden steamy silence, goosebumps rise on her arms.

“The acoustics in here are amazing,” Lana says, because the silence is too tender to bear.

“I picked that song so I could hear you sing it,” Marina says. The water shuts off and she sticks her head around the edge of the curtain. “I have the biggest crush on your voice.”

Lana chucks Marina’s towel at her, panicking. When she gets flustered, she doesn’t stammer and blush in the cute, girly way Marina does. She’s endured too much bullying to react in a charming way. Instead, she gets all flat and sarcastic. “I’m sure many people are romantically interested in your voice, too,” she says coolly. She is Not Looking at Marina as she steps out from behind the curtain, wrapped in the towel, so she doesn’t see the look on Marina’s face, or her long bare legs beaded with diamond water drops, or how pink and vulnerable her scrubbed skin looks, or the shape of her athletic curves hugged by 36 inches of terrycloth. Lana doesn’t have to see any of it.

Marina puts on a tank top and clean underwear and slides into her bed. God. It’s just completely unfair.

“When you were little, did you play that game at sleepovers? The touching game?” Marina asks muzzily, sinking her face into her pillow.

Lana’s heart hammers like she’s just sprinted up five flights of stairs. She could not feel less tired. She doesn’t trust her tongue not to betray her, so she says nothing.

“Like this,” Marina says. She flops out her own bare arm and traces her fingertips down it. “I touch you so lightly, you’re not sure if you can feel it.”

“The shiver game,” Lana says, remembering. It’s one of those memories buried in the drifts of sun-soaked, freckled girlhood, half-dreamed and half-imagined, the after-midnight nightlight hours of a hundred sleepovers. Then she shoots Marina a look. “I’m not going to touch you.”

“Didn’t ask you to.” Marina yawns hugely, tickling her own arm softly. Then she rolls over and pats the bed beside here, saying, “C’mere.” She doesn’t even sound drunk anymore, though Lana’s certain she can’t have metabolized that much alcohol this quickly. Lana hurriedly changes into a t-shirt and some baggy gym shorts of Marina’s and gets into the bed, trying to keep herself confined to the smallest edge of the mattress she can manage. Her whole body is rigid with dread and anticipation of Marina’s spidery, barely-there touch. But Marina, thank god, stays on her side, and the other girl falls asleep fast, without any more conversation. 

Lana, though. Lana just lays awake and stares at the ceiling in the dark, waiting for this fucking talent show to be over.

*

Marina’s late to school the day of the talent show, because halfway there she asks her aunt to take her to a cafe instead. “Please, Aunty Brynn. Me and Lana need herbal tea for our voices. We’re performing tonight.”

Aunty Brynn gives her a _look_ , the one that every adult in her family has been giving her since she was expelled from her school in Wales. It’s a look like she’s a deranged, perverted monster, whose carnal lusts can neither be sated nor controlled. It’s a look that says _no more gay shit, Marina, you are on the thinnest ice_. 

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with Lana,” Brynn says in a measured voice.

“Well, duh. We’re practicing for the show, aren’t we? We’ve had a lot to rehearse.”

Brynn’s lips twitch, like she wants to laugh at Marina’s _duh_ but isn’t sure when it’s permissible to laugh at teenagers in your custody. “If there was something else going on—” Brynn starts.

“There’s _not_!” snaps Marina.

“If there _was_ ,” Aunty Brynn continues. Marina slumps down in her seat, cheeks burning with a choking combination of shame and rage. “I’d want you to know. I wouldn’t send you away for that kind of thing.”

Marina’s shoulders are up around her ears, her butt slouched all the way to the edge of the passenger seat. She is trying very hard to disappear. She has no idea what Brynn is talking about, and she says so. “What are you on about?”

Brynn stares determinedly at the road ahead. She’s no longer driving toward the school, Marina notices. Watching U.S. driving still terrifies her: everyone is driving on the wrong side of the road, and left turns are absolute insanity, but even after closing her eyes instead of looking at the road for the past four months, she can tell they’re heading away from the high school.

“Esther didn’t know what to do with you, love, and I don’t blame her for that. But I asked her to send you here, instead of to your dad in Greece, because I thought… I thought you’d have an easier time in California. I thought you’d meet more people… like you.”

Marina has never talked about what happened at her old school with—anyone. Her family was horrified and ashamed and sympathetic, and they also made it very clear that they didn’t want to hear anything about it, ever again. Like any bad omen, they wanted Marina’s immoral behavior to disappear. If that meant Marina had to disappear, so be it. She does not want to imagine what it would be like living with her Greek Orthodox father. He probably would send her to a convent, too heterosexist to realize what a sapphic paradise that would be, or try to get a priest to drive the demons out of her.

SoCal with Aunty Brynn is so much better than any of that.

Marina has the feeling this moment is a trap. Brynn is setting her up to confess, at which point she’ll toss her into a conversion camp to be tortured. For all Marina knows that’s where they’re driving now. Some things are too dangerous to be spoken aloud. Some things are too dangerous to be.

“To be honest, Aunty Brynn, Lana is a complete headcase. We’re just practicing for the talent show. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She swallows the memory of bile on her tongue and adds, “Did I tell you about this cute guy I totally made out with last weekend?”

Brynn’s gaze flicks over to Marina, but now Marina is the one staring determinedly ahead. “The less I know about what you do on weekends, the better,” Brynn decides. “And don’t tell your mother either. She remains under the impression that I am a strict disciplinarian, and I’d like to keep it that way.” She pulls into the drivethrough of a coffee shop, and Marina releases some of the stinking animal fear she’s been gripping tight. “Now, let’s see how massively super-sized we can get our tamping American tea.”

By the time she gets to school with her giant to-go cups of tea, which definitely follows the American Quantity Over Quality rule, homeroom has already started. Marina marches down the music corridor to Lana’s homeroom and knocks politely on the door.

A highly speculative Mr. Meisner opens it. “Good morning, ma’am,” Marina says sweetly. “I’m just here to drop some tea off for Lana.”

What she can see of the classroom beyond erupts into side-eye and whispers. Well, half-erupts: the other half of the students have that early-morning lobotomized slump that comes from requiring teenagers to be groomed and functional for a 7:20am start time. “Emily Dildoson, is that your new girlfriend?” a jock guy hoots. Marina’s vision whites out with mortification for a second, and as the room fizzles back into view, she realizes it’s that guy whose lap she puked in last weekend.

“One more word and it’s detention, Mr. Hanover,” Meisner says, but his voice is all but a snicker. It’s obvious he thinks the joke is funny, condones the phallic bullying of girls who stand accused of queerness. 

Marina isn’t one to waste an opportunity to woo the talent show judge just because she’s suddenly trembly with fear, though. She does her best sultry smirk at Meisner, looking up at him through long eyelashes, and says, “Don’t be gross. I’m not anyone’s.” Then she winks right at him. “Yet.”

The dude (Matt, is that his name? the barf recipient) snorts in disgust, but Meiser looks like he’s listening with his dick, so that’s something. Marina wishes she could vomit on them both. Instead, she hands off the tea to Mr. Meisner as sexily as possible. Based on the ways his eyes trail, like slugs, up and down her body, Marina has a theory about how she can win the talent show. After all, she didn’t sabotage her entire social life so that she could _lose_.

Lana sits beside her in U.S. History, which is not typical. Marina actually thinks Lana sat closer to her before they started this project together, like Marina was basically okay until Lana got to know her, but now she’s repulsive or something. Whatever. Marina can only hold so many worries at once.

But if she thinks Lana’s sitting near her voluntarily out of friendliness, she is mistaken. Just like how, the Monday after their sleepover, which started admittedly poorly but ended well, with tea and Aunty Brynn’s famous Welsh cakes and a jam session that lasted most of Saturday, she expected some warmth and was mistaken. Just like she’s been mistaken this entire time, really, that at some point Lana would cross a threshold and begin finding her tolerable. Bubblegum bitch, she called Marina at that stupid party. As if Lana isn’t the only one of them who regularly chews outrageously pink bubblegum. Everything has been off since that party. Marina wishes she remembered it better. Her recollection is pretty spotty, with bright smeary flashes of puke, an argument about she’s not sure what, some dancing, and possibly maybe a shower? She shakes her head like a Magic 8 ball, but nothing gets clearer.

Lana plunks down into the seat next to her with vigor, glaring blackly. Her weirdo goth friend Hennie sits on the other side of her. Hennie has only ever stared straight through Marina. It is highly unnerving. Marina doesn’t understand the refusal to at least _try_ to blend in, to seem normal. It’s the most basic survival strategy she can think of.

“What is even wrong with you,” Lana says, which is not the hello Marina was hoping for.

“What’s wrong with _you_ ,” she throws back, instantly defensive. “You are seriously such a bitch sometimes.”

“Did you literally bring me tea just so you could embarrass me in homeroom? I don’t understand you. Sometimes you act like you’re trying to be my friend, and then other times—and what the hell was that with Mr. Meisner? I almost puked harder than you last Friday. Did you forget he’s the enemy?”

“He’s totally gross,” Hennie says, staring at the front of the classroom like a soulless automaton. If the intended effect is being _creepy as hell_ , well, it has the intended effect. “Flirting with him makes you complicit in feminine oppression.”

“Um, okay?” Marina does not even know how to deal with Hennie. She has tears drawn on her face in eyeliner today, which Marina is pretty sure from American stereotypes is a gang thing, and black lipstick coated on so thick it looks like greasepaint. Marina patently does not care about this person’s opinion. “I brought you tea for your _voice_ , El? So maybe gratitude would be nice? And the only reason I flirted with Meisner is because the point of all of this is to _win_ the talent show. Otherwise there’s like, literally no reason for us to ever have hung out at all.”

“That becomes more and more obvious,” Lana says icily, which Marina thinks is kind of a dick move, given the situation is literally ‘Marina brought me tea out of the goodness of her heart.’ 

Even though she’s not the one who should be apologizing, here, Marina feels a spasm of guilt. She hates it when things feel strained between them. She’s not sure things have ever felt relaxed, exactly, but it has gotten so. Much. Worse. since last weekend. Since they stood so close there was only moonlight between them, and Marina’s inhalation tasted like Lana’s exhale, and she almost ruined it all. Since Marina realized—admitted—that there isn’t anything she wants more than to find out what Lana tastes like. If it’s half as good as she looks, Marina’s pretty sure it’s game over for her heart.

Of course she fucking remembers _that_ part. What’s the point of drinking to forget, if things like that burn so deep into her brain that there’s no way to ever get them out?

She leans across her deck, clasps Lana’s wrist. “Can we just get along, please?” she hisses, the U.S. History teacher circling ever closer since they’re obviously not doing their 8-minute Current Events newspaper skim that they’re meant to start class with. “I’m really excited for tonight, and we worked really hard, and—and I just want us to at least act like we’re friends. I’m sorry I got you tea. I will never do it again, cross my heart and hope to die. Okay?”

Lana’s wearing the pout that means she’s not done having her feelings hurt, but Marina thinks it’s a little half-hearted. Lana wants to be friends, too, at least for tonight. Marina squeezes Lana’s wrist, and Lana grabs and squeezes Marina back. “Okay,” she whispers. “I’m excited too.”

Hennie rolls her eyes, literally at nothing because she’ll only stare straight ahead, and the USH teacher finally reaches them. “Your newspapers, ladies, if it’s not too much trouble to get participation credit for today?” 

Marina grabs her newspaper with a guilty-yet-(hopefully)-charming smile. She reads it one-handed, because Lana’s still holding her wrist.

*

Marina in sequins should be illegal. For real: Lana is calling the British embassy. She is lodging a formal complaint.

“Well? How do I look?” Marina spins, tottering a little on black platform heels, her silver sequin cut-out dress so tight it looks like tiny iridescent scales grow on her like skin. But hot. God, even in her head Lana turns into a blathering idiot when Marina’s around. Imagine if Marina asked _how do I look_ and Lana said _like a fish._ The other girl’s eyes are lined in cat-eye wings, lids painted white-hot liquid silver all the way up to her dark brows. Her lips are their usual sticky pink, shining with gloss. Everything about her gleams.

For her part, Lana’s in the blue velvet, her collarbones dusted with gold glitter and her face carefully contoured in the dusky tones of Hollywood starlets from half a century ago. She winged her eyeliner carefully, painted her lips. She’s got sapphire drops glittering in her ears and a little fascinator with peacock feathers she made with her mother’s sewing machine on top of her smooth, well-brushed hair. She feels awkward and exposed in color. Deep blue feels like neon after years’ worth of head-to-toe black. 

Then Marina breathes in, parting her lips, and says, “Whoa. Forget how I look. Lana, have you _seen_ you?”

Last night Lana dreamed about Marina. Which she is formally adding to the list of injustices she personally suffers from. In the dream, they ate side-by-side in a restaurant and talked without arguing. Marina was wearing this sheer, gauzy, diamondy material that made her look like a Britney Spears video, or maybe just a goddess. Her hair was rich, inky black, a drowning color that gleamed russet in the candlelight. There wasn’t anything to the dream but that. Marina was breathtaking, they ate dinner together in a public place, and they got along.

It’s just that nothing like that has ever happened, or will ever happen, between them. Marina’s still never really been nice to Lana where other people could see them, except for when she was drunk. They get along worse every time they hang out. Marina maybe almost kissed her on Friday night, and Lana’s body realized before her brain did that she _wanted her to_ , and then they didn’t. Marina kissed somebody else instead.

And it turns out Lana’s not okay about it.

She really, really doesn’t want to go onstage with Marina tonight. She never wants to see Marina again. And Marina is all she wants to see. Marina pin-ups as wallpaper, chandeliers made to sparkle like Marina’s eyes, crushed carpets as thick and soft and dark as Marina’s natural hair: Lana wants the rest of her life to be a house made of Marina, made into Marina, and she wants to haunt it with her intense, disturbing passion. Because this isn’t desire, or isn’t just desire. Lana doesn’t just want to touch Marina, or hold her, or kiss her; that isn’t enough anymore. Was never enough. Lana is trembling or overflowing or insane. Lana wants to be this girl. Lana wants to have her. Lana wants to inhabit or consume or become her. She wants them both to smash to the ground so hard they shatter, and the pieces get mixed up, and they get put back together all tangled into one, broken or maybe finally mended, made of one another.

It’s terrifying. It is a terrifying and monstrous way to feel. None of the lukewarm crushes on men Lana’s fanned into life ever prepared her for a feeling like this. She thinks it might be love, except that’s scary too, because Lana’s never been in love with a woman before, no matter what they say about her at school, no matter what she’s suspected about herself in secret. Lana’s never been in love with anyone. She has no standard of comparison. Is it meant to be unbearable? Is it meant to feel like it’s tearing her apart?

And she’s supposed to get on stage and perform in, like, fifteen minutes. With Marina. Who’s dressed like a sexy, naked fish. In front of the people who have bullied her for being a lesbian for years, _who Lana just realized were right._

Lana never wanted to know any of this about herself. Or: she’s always known it, and it sucks anyway. There is not a lot to recommend the experience of being a gay teenager at the turn of the century. She’d much rather be a dead poet from the last one.

Marina waves a hand in front of her face. “El? You look like you’re in pain.”

“Isn’t Lana a short enough name for you?” Lana snarls, surprising herself with her own anger. She hates the way Marina says her name. She hates the way Marina looks at her. She hates the way it makes her _hope_ , and she hates the way it feels to be seen.

“Would you prefer Lizzy? Remember, after this, you never have to talk to me again if you don’t want to.” Marina squeezes her upper arm in this way that a normal, non-creepy girl would experience as friendly.

“You have no idea what I want,” Lana says hopelessly, and then, to her tremendous horror, she begins to cry.

“I’m nervous too,” Marina says, always generous when her friends aren’t watching, and her upper arm squeeze turns into a hug.

A whole, entire, full-body hug.

Lana has experienced objectification directly, so she has enough inside knowledge to be thoroughly disgusted at her own reaction to feeling Marina’s body press against hers. Marina tangles her fingers through Lana’s hair until she can stroke the back of Lana’s neck, and it’s probably supposed to be comforting, but instead it’s giving Lana goosebumps. She cries harder. 

“You’re going to ruin your makeup,” Marina whispers into her ear, which is a nicer thing to say than _everyone else in the practice room is staring at you_ but conveys a similar message of stop-now-please-god. “Don’t worry too much, okay? I have a secret weapon.”

It takes Lana a good thirty seconds to figure out what Marina thinks she’s worried about. Right: the talent show. Marina pulls back from the hug, keeping hold of Lana’s shoulders, and shows her brilliant smile. “You know what I want to do with you while we wait to go on?” Marina asks, and Lana’s entire soul aches with a feeling she can no longer deny is desire. “Figure out what we’re going to do with the prize money. ‘Cuz I promise we’re gonna win.”

*

Onstage with Lana feels like meant-to-be. Marina can’t explain it. She’s performed before, tons: singing a capella in choir, playing piano at recitals, stomping around grandly on stage with facial hair spirit-glued to her chin in all-girl productions of Shakespeare and Dickens. But it’s never felt like this.

They step out onto a stage that’s diamond and glass, look out into an audience of strangers. Marina feels entirely transported from this crappy high school gymnasium. She doesn’t feel like she’s at school, doesn’t feel like the person she’s made herself into in America. She’s spun sugar and sequins and a soaring voice. She feels Lana beside her like they’re threaded together with golden veins, glittering madly under the lights and throbbing with what they share. Whatever it is they share.

Marina wants to touch Lana, so she does: reaches out and grabs her hand. They walk to the center of the stage, into the poorly manned spotlights. Marina keeps hold of Lana til their fingers are spiderweb-stretched, then lets her go and heads to her keyboard. She can still feel Lana’s heartbeat in her palm.

Their first song is a duet, Nancy Sinatra’s Summer Wine. It’s not at all the type of song that wins talent shows, until Lana’s soft, dreamy voice stretches velvet over the melody. It’s slow and twangy and perfect. Lana sings like a doomed princess and no one in the audience makes a sound. Marina’s so distracted by the other girl, she almost misses the cue to start her first verse. Once she starts singing, though, Marina’s sense of self slips under the warm currents of Modern Girl. Time gets starry and strange. Before she knows it, they’re ramping energy up into the second song, and Lana starts to dance, bouncing and twirling with her acoustic. Marina shimmies and sings and smashes her keyboard. Sleater-Kinney is not a band cheerleaders listen to, but their voices scrape together just like they did in Lana’s bedroom that night, and it feels powerful and raw to shout women’s rage on a stage boys usually use to whine men’s malaise.

The people standing in the front are dancing and bobbing along by the time they start the deconstructed jazz-singer intro of To Your Love. It feels like approval, heady and connected, and Marina drinks it in. She feels electric, and when Lana dances across the stage towards her, the current intensifies. Does it mean something, that Lana looks right in Marina’s eyes while she sings “ _Please forgive me for my distance, the shame is manifest in my resistance to your love_ ”? It is possible to sing those words right at someone _without_ it meaning something? God, what happened on Friday? Why do things feel so different between them now?

Marina’s so lost in Lana—maybe has been for a long time—that the last song ends before she’s ready for it. Lana plays harder and faster and Marina follows, their parts becoming ever more discordant until it just breaks apart into _sound_ , and then they let the silence hit jagged and loud. They grin at each other, both a little out of breath. Lana’s cheeks are flushed with exertion, her breasts moving as she breathes hard, and Marina doesn’t care if they’re friends or not, Marina loves her.

People are clapping and cheering for them, and this is probably the best act the school talent show has ever seen, and Marina steps around her keyboard to hug Lana around the waist. Some of the cheers stutter, but others get louder. The lights go down, their cue to exit the stage so the next group of mediocre white boys can come set up, and Marina’s still holding onto Lana’s waist. Their mouths are not so very far apart. Their heartbeats are the same.

“Don’t,” Lana says, alone in the dark and right in front of everyone at the same time. “You’ll ruin everything.”

Marina’s grip falls from Lana’s hips. Numbly, she begins packing up her keyboard. Lana walks offstage and doesn’t look back.

*

Look, she didn’t make a dramatic exit just so Marina could chase her.

“El. Lana. Lizzy. Wait!” Marina calls, clomping after her in those huge heels, swinging her unwieldy keyboard as she goes. Lana makes it all the way to the band room they’re all using as a dressing room before Marina catches up. It’s a huge keyboard.

She just. Needs to get away from Marina right now. Because she almost—on stage, at the end of the show, when the lights went out and for a second it was just the two of them—god. She _almost_. And if she can’t trust herself not to kiss Marina Diamandis on the mouth in front of everyone? She needs to get away from Marina’s mouth.

Marina sets her keyboard sloppily on some chairs and comes over to where Lana is tugging earrings out of her ears, undoing the pins that hold her fascinator in place. “That was so completely awesome!” she gushes, glowing like the bleach-blond sun. “When can we get on stage again? I want to do that every night.”

All Lana wants is to crawl back into the comfort of her bulky black sweater and long schoolmarm skirt, but she’d have to ask Marina to unzip her dress for her and then she would literally die of the feeling of Marina’s fingertips brushing her bare skin. Instead she gathers up her street clothes and holds them protectively against her belly, hiding her overeager cleavage and putting up a safety barrier between her and the other girl.

“You’re going to make a great superstar,” Lana says, voice brittle. Of course it felt amazing. Of course it was completely awesome. Of course she’s in love with this dumb fake blond cheerleader who, as of the last note played in their set tonight, is officially done with her and will never speak to her again. No, worse: she will speak to her again, but only to call her Saliva Plath or Beat-off Hastings or whatever else will make her cronies laugh that day. Fuck, Lana would give anything to look and sound normal in this moment, but instead her throat cracks like shatterglass and her eyes sear with tears.

“No,” Marina laughs, squeezing Lana’s shoulder and then letting her horrible hand horribly linger. “I want to do that every night _with you_.”

“Well, I just want to go home,” Lana says. Throbbing with adrenaline and burning with heartache, she’s going to start crying any second, and she refuses to do that in front of Marina. She steps out of Marina’s reach and the other girl looks hurt, as if she has any business having feelings about Lana _now_ , when it’s too late, when everything’s already over.

“Aren’t you going to stay? They’re going to announce winners soon!”

“I don’t feel like sitting by myself while you call me a lesbian, thanks.”

“You are being _so mean_ ,” Marina says. Her voice is as wobbly as her high heels.

“Because I don’t like you!” Lana lies, so overwhelmed by what she felt onstage combined with the hurt in Marina’s eyes and weeks of imagining the flavor of her lip gloss that she just can’t deal for one minute more. “I never have and I never will, okay? So stop following me around and sticking yourself where you’re not welcome, okay?”

“Oh,” says Marina. “I thought maybe—oh.” 

Lana doesn’t want to see the look on Marina’s face, so she storms off. Hennie’s out there somewhere, and she’s always perfectly happy to share a cigarette and listen to Lana vent about how terrible Marina is. That’s _exactly_ what she needs right now.

Except when she’s outside, sitting on the hood of Hennie’s car in this dumb blue dress that doesn’t even belong to her, she doesn’t even like the taste of the cigarette. It burns like formaldehyde and tastes like strawberries. It’s supposed to be smoke and ash, to burn her lips clear of their treachery, but instead it fills her mouth like Marina.

“Aren’t you glad you don’t have to hang out with her anymore?” Hennie sneers. All of the sneering Lana just did at actual Marina seems to have used up all her spite, though. She’s exhausted. Exhausted from being so happy, then so angry, then so _empty_.

“I think I’m in love with her,” she says to Hennie, because it’s been eating her up in silence and she thinks maybe there will be more room to breathe inside her if she puts the words out into the world.

Hennie is so startled she drops her lit cigarette and burns a hole in her stockings. “What? Marina? Oh, Lana,” she says, clearly disappointed. “She’s never going to like you back. She’d just use you to have a story to tell at parties.”

“I know,” Lana says miserably. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

Then Hennie sits up straight and says, “Wait. Isn’t that your girlfriend over there?” Through the dark parking lot, she points at the emergency exit doors that come off the gymnasium annex. The doors swing open, showing a flash of indoor light, and Mr. Meisner comes trailing out. With him is a girl dressed in a cloak of needles, a night sky’s worth of silver stars. She tosses her blond hair, giggles. Leans against the wall, arching her back so her boobs stick out. Flirting is unmistakable from this distance. Then Meisner leans in, and—

If some gross old teacher kisses her before Lana does, Lana will never forgive herself. She takes off running across the parking lot, kicking off her shoes so they don’t slow her down.

“MARINA!” Lana hollers as she comes running up to them. Meisner springs back, caught in the act of being a creepy disgusting perv. It is not lost on Lana that he is doing exactly what she is always accused of. “Leave her alone, you creep!”

Meisner looks guilty as sin. “I think you’re confused about what you’re seeing here,” he says, so calm in this moment that Lana can tell just how many times he’s lied about taking advantage of his students. “I’m just personally notifying Miss Diamandis of her win. Congratulations, girls.” He sticks his hand out from comically far away, and Marina actually has to step forward to shake it. Lana refuses the hand when it’s her turn.

Meisner scurries away inside like the cockroach that he is. Marina has the audacity to beam at her. “See, I told you I had a secret weapon!” she laughs. The laugh has a dangerous edge to it, like the sound of nothing to lose. 

“You let him—did you—just so we’d _win_?” Lana sputters. She can’t get the words out. She wonders if this is what dying feels like. She spends a lot of time thinking about that, and she always assumed it would happen slower. The agony of Marina is trainwreck fast.

“I just flirted a little, don’t worry. Nothing gross.” Marina’s so cavalier about it, like her sexuality is a tool to be used, like she has no idea how easy it would have been for her to get hurt, out here alone in a parking lot with the kind of gross predator who would take her out here alone in a parking lot.

“Marina, that _is_ gross,” Lana says. “You are worth a lot more than a talent show prize.”

“This has nothing to do with my self-worth, okay? I just wanted to win!”

“We played well enough to win!” Lana’s voice is rolling out like thunder. She thinks she’s yelling. She’s never yelled at anyone before. No one’s ever made her feel so mad or so out of control; no one’s ever made her feel the way Marina does. “And if we didn’t win, so what? It was—it was the coolest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Really?” The glitter-sharp edges of Marina soften. This is a clear _danger, turn back_ sign, but Lana’s apparently no longer paying attention to those. “You acted like you hated it. Like you hated me.”

“I don’t hate you,” Lana says, her voice breaking on the word and giving everything away. 

“The way you’re yelling at me kind of makes it seem like you do.” Marina’s voice is small. 

“It’s just. You do this every time. You just throw yourself at some guy every time we—” Lana bites off her own words, or tries to: she swallows one risky sentence only for another one to come pouring out. “You’re acting like a coward and it pisses me off. You couldn’t find out if we were good enough to win, you couldn’t find out what would have happened on Friday if you’d spent the night with me instead of that barf bag, you couldn’t tell Ivy even _one time_ that she should back off with the lesbian jokes because they’re maybe about you too—”

Marina’s eyes flash like a meteor strike. Suddenly she’s right up in Lana’s face, her voice pouring out thick with her Welsh accent in snake-strike anger. “Watch your goddamn mouth! My aunt is here, for the love of fuck. Do you know what happens to me if she hears you say that shite? Call me a coward if you want, you don’t know what I’ve lived through. But don’t you fucking dare call me a dyke!”

“ _Dyke_ ,” Lana whispers, low and furious. She’s never said the word out loud before, afraid maybe that it’s the kind of magic that gets more true if you say it aloud, afraid that she could speak it into being—so she never knew before this moment how good it feels. How strong. How _right_. It’s a solid word, a don’t-fuck-with-me word, a true word in a world where she’s never felt entitled to tell the truth about who she is.

She’d have more epiphanies about the life-changing liberation of the word dyke, maybe, except Marina’s so mad that she grabs Lana by the chin and smashes their faces together. Lana finally made her so furious that they’re kissing. No one’s holding anything back anymore. There’s no longer anything to lose.

Lana would describe the kiss, but she can’t think. She is one raw nerve, She has never been kissed before, like this or by anyone. That’s her secret, one of her secrets. It spills out of her under Marina’s lips. Marina’s lips don’t taste like lipgloss the way she’s been dreaming they do. Marina tastes like a real girl, not a stereotype, glitter and metal and salt, her tongue sweet and her teeth sharp. There’s loving someone, full of anger and angst, wringing your hands and crying into the comforter you’ve had since childhood; then there’s kissing them. Raw and real and this, this, this. Lana knows the difference now. She falls in love like falling off a cliff, just like she knew she would. She kisses like she’s getting CPR, the wad of tissue in her chest hammered back to life by Marina’s ministrations. She is gasping, she is electrocharged, she is waking. She is coming home.

They break apart, staring at each other in astonishment, because they have ascended to a whole new plane of disbelief. Lana can’t hear anything but her roaring blood in her ears, but she sees Marina’s lips shape the word _Wow_. Lana’s the reason all Marina’s lip gloss has smeared off tonight. Lana wants to always be the reason.

Slowly, clap by clap, Lana becomes aware of someone cheering. She turns away from Marina, remembering all at once that she has a physical body and it’s here, in the physical parking lot of her physical high school. Hennie’s sitting on her car, clapping and whooping and laughing. “Way to get the girl, del Rey!” she calls, because Hennie is a good friend.

But Marina’s face is empty of blood, completely blanched, when Lana looks back at her. Lana reaches for her hand, saying, “It’s okay, it’s just Hennie,” but Marina wrenches her grip away.

“Oh god,” she whispers. “This can’t happen. This can’t happen again.”

As far as Lana knows, this is the first time they’ve kissed. She reaches for Marina’s hand again, in a vague gesture toward comfort, but Marina evades her. “Don’t touch me,” she gasps, her face a mask of horror Lana cannot begin to understand. “Don’t let anyone see you touch me.”

Lana’s feelings are—well, they’re starting to get pretty hurt. “Marina, I’m glad that happened. I’ve wanted to—”

But Marina isn’t listening. She darts for the door back into the gymnasium and whips it open. “ _Don’t_ follow me,” she says. “Don’t let anyone see us together.” Before Lana can so much as say _what the fuck is going on_ , she’s disappeared inside. 

*

Monday after school and Aunty Brynn asks, “Where’s Lana today?”

Marina’s mouth is full of broken glass. She says the only true thing she thinks it’s safe to admit. “Now that the show’s over, she doesn’t want to see me anymore.”

“I’m sorry, love. You two seemed to really enjoy each other’s company.” There’s so much sympathy on Brynn’s face, Marina can’t stand it.

“Not really. I keep telling you, we aren’t friends.” Marina can’t look at her. Days later, she might see the impression of Lana’s lips, hear the echo of the word _dyke_ and how it rang like joy instead of accusation, see the truth burnt into Marina like a brand.

Instead of leaving like Marina wants her to, Aunty Brynn sits down on the edge of the bed. She starts ticking her evidence off on her fingers. “You’ve been in your room since Friday night, playing such sad music even the plants are getting suicidal. The girl who’s been over practically every day for a month is gone and you keep insisting you don’t care about her. Your mean girl friends haven’t been over in weeks. You’ve even got a spot. Or I think you do—hard to tell when you won’t look at me. Something is clearly going on here.”

Marina flops onto her back on the bed next to Aunty Brynn, allowing her aunt to see her face (and pimple) if that’s going to make her happy.

“Talk to me, mush,” Brynn says, looking down at her. There’s no sign she can see Marina’s scarlet letter. “Please?”

“I guess I just haven’t been feeling like myself,” Marina says grudgingly.

Aunty Brynn starts petting her hair, spreading the white-blond strands out across the comforter. “Maybe it’s this travesty,” she teases. 

“Travesty!” Marina protests.

“Well, love. It’s drag queen hair. Surely someone’s told you that?” Brynn ducks, giggling, as Marina swings a pillow at her face.

“You’re right, though,” Marina says, laying her arms down. “Ever since I got here I’ve been trying to be someone else.”

“I did notice that. I thought maybe it was puberty?”

“Aunty! How old do you think I _am_?” Brynn’s trying to make her laugh, and it’s working. “If you can’t handle raising a 17 year old, you definitely could not have coped with puberty.”

“God bless Esther for doing it, then.”

Marina’s stomach twists at mention of her mother. Mam would be so disappointed if she knew what happened Friday night. If Marina was just going to do what she did Friday night, what was the point of even coming here? It’s like she’s determined to fuck up her life, again and again, no matter how many fresh starts her family sacrifices to give her.

“You don’t need to be different,” her aunt is saying. She wouldn’t say things like that if she knew what Marina and Lana had done, only as soon as Marina thinks it, Brynn says, “It would be fine with me if we dyed your hair brown and you went back to snogging girls. In fact, nothing would make me happier. I like who you are, whether you’re wearing fake beards and doing Hamlet and shagging in your dorm, or whether you’re a blond six-pack in a cheer uniform with mean friends. I mean, I won’t say I don’t have _preferences_ , but I guess Ivy isn’t so bad once you get to know her.”

Brynn is clearly poking fun at her, but Marina is pinned to the corkboard by what she’s said. “Mam _told_ you all that? About—me and Caitrin?” she goggles, which is hardly the most pertinent question, but she can’t imagine her mother saying the words out loud. None of the adults told her what was being discussed about her, exactly. Just that she had been shamed and must be sent away.

“You used to make your Barbies kiss when you were three,” Brynn grins. “When Esther told me, I was hardly surprised. Caitrin, though. I didn’t know the name. It’s a pretty one.”

“ _I_ was surprised,” Marina mutters. “You could’ve told me.”

“You would have just had a fit and stopped talking to me. Like you did in the car the other day.” Aunty Brynn regards her seriously, the teasing gleam leaving her eyes. “You don’t have to tell me if there’s something going on with Lana. I will stop prying if you truly want me to. Just—tell me you’re okay, mush. These last four months you’re so scared all the time, I barely know you.” 

Marina covers her face with her hands and takes a deep breath. It’s easier, with her eyes hidden. Or it’s easier, with nothing left. “I got kicked out of my school for kissing girls,” she says behind her hands. “I got kicked out of my family.”

Aunty Brynn says, “Not this family.”

Marina peeks at her aunt. She feels warm, somehow. Warm all at once where she hadn’t realized she was freezing. “Will Mam and Dad and Lafina find out?”

“Someday, I hope. But it won’t be from me.”

Brynn’s face is perfectly smooth and calm and placid, like they’re talking about the weather, like they’re talking about kissing boys. Maybe, Marina lets herself think for the first time, like unclenching a fist and feeling blood rush back in to fingers that have long been stone—maybe everything isn’t ruined. Maybe everything is going to be okay.

“Okay,” she says out loud, tonguing the word like a loose tooth, trying it out. Testing its flavor.

“Okay what?” pushes Brynn.

“Okay, let’s dye my hair.”

In Wales, there is no such thing as cheer practice. There’s not a cheerleader in all of Great Britain. That’s why Marina wanted to do it, sort of. It’s an activity perfectly incompatible with her old life, with who she used to be. Rumors couldn’t find her here, the logic went, not if she was blonde and on top of a cheer pyramid. Not if she was nigh unrecognizable. In the States, Marina Diamandis wasn’t a brown-haired girl whose brightly colored socks always earned her dress code demerits, an eccentric presence in the sixth form who was madly, stupidly, semi-secretly in love with Caitrin Davies. She wasn’t a girl who got caught in her roommate’s knickers, Caitrin’s knees framing her ears, Caitrin’s back arching off her dorm mattress. She wasn’t a girl who got expelled alongside her true love, only to have her true love blame her. Only to have the girl she thought she’d spend her whole life with whisper hotly, furiously in her ear, _I never want to see you again_ , and then follow through on that, leaving Marina’s calls and letters and pleas unanswered for months, even when Marina got banished from the continent.

_Anyhow_. Marina’s not thinking about that shite. Marina’s brown-haired and blowing off practice, roving the empty, after-school halls in search of Lana. Lana has managed to avoid her all week, which, can’t blame her. But now it’s been nearly a week since Marina fucked up royally, since Lana’s kiss lit her upside and made her feel like herself for the first time in half a year and she was so fucking terrified she acted like Caitrin and ran away. Nearly a week of being pestered with acceptance by Aunty Brynn. Nearly a week of interrogating her heart, searching for and finding the cowardice Lana accused her of. Nearly a week to _miss_ Lana in a way that is undeniable. Missing someone is an exact measure of what they meant to you, cut out of your shadow upside-down and backwards.

So now Marina knows exactly what Lana means to her. And it’s Thursday, so Marina may actually be able to find her.

*

Marina busts into the drama room like a flashback to a car crash. The door bangs open with the force of her entry, everyone jumps, and Lana’s blood turns cold and hot at once when it’s Marina Diamandis standing framed in the doorway. Lana’s underarms prickle with sweat and her mouth goes dry, some terrible mammal instinct she didn’t sign up for.

The last time she saw this person, they kissed. It seemed like a good thing. Lana felt certain. Then Marina stumbled back like she’d been hit, recoiled like Lana’s touch was monstrous, and ran away.

Believe it or not, Lana’s night pretty much sucked after that. Her whole life did. Hennie, dear sweet Hennie, gathered her up in her arms and pet her hair, soothing. She drove Lana home while Lana wept, and they spent the night head-to-toe in Lana’s narrow bed like they’ve been doing for years. Hennie said things like _It was really brave that you went for it_ and _Girls like that are bitches anyway_ , and Lana didn’t want to seem ungrateful, so she acted like it helped. None of it helped. It’s like for one second the tangled mess inside her made _sense_ , had some _clarity_ —but Marina is not a lighthouse beam guiding anyone to safety. She’s the rocky, ship-eating shore hidden under low tide, mortal peril beneath the deception of safety. 

Lana is not proud of this moment, but what she does as Marina bears down on the drama club is, she hides. Faster than she can think, she ducks behind one of the big set pieces they’ve been tacking iridescent blue plastic sheeting to. From behind the murky ocean-glow of the plastic, Lana watches Marina scan the room and fail to find her.

“Is—is Lana here?” Marina asks the drama club tentatively.

Hennie steps toward her, her chest puffed up and her hands on her hips. “No,” she lies. “And she wouldn’t want to see you if she was.”

There will be gossip about this moment for weeks, Lana knows, but what matters is that none of the drama kids sell her out. Marina’s face falls, she thinks, through the blur of the plastic sheeting, and at last she leaves.

Lana stays behind the set piece for a while, twisting her fingers together and then apart. She wonders what Marina was going to say, if she had found her. Another loud, flirty, gross denunciation of Lana’s company in favor of gross men? Maybe she was coming like a messenger pigeon to deliver some cruel comment of Ivy’s? Maybe she thought of another dead poet she could use for a lesbian pun. Lana knows it’s only a matter of time until what happened on Friday night turns into part of the story about her. _Lesbo del Rey, serial assaulter, strikes again_.

But fuck if she doesn’t want to hear it. If it means talking to Marina again. Whatever lie Marina has to tell about her to make it okay for them to be together, that—maybe that would be okay.

Because Marina kissed her back. Lana thinks. It’s hard to remember now. The week of avoidance and excessive reconstruction has worn the edges of the memory away, so it’s hard to pick apart wishful thinking vs. enthusiastic kissing.

This is why she’s hiding behind an uninspired ocean set. She doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing, but she’s going to break her own heart if someone doesn’t stop her.

“You should talk to her,” Hennie says from behind her, and Lana is so startled she smacks her head on the set piece. 

“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Lana accuses.

“You told me you were in _love_ with that piece of work. So your side says you should talk to her.”

“She looks really beautiful as a brunette,” Lana sighs, hiding her face in Hennie’s shoulder.

Hennie pats her back with her usual distaste for human emotion. Lana does not feel even a little better.

Friday comes after another mostly-sleepless night. Lana had another Marina dream, this one where Marina issued a string of demands that Lana scrambled to comply with. _Wear pink to school and I’ll like you. Shave your pubic hair and we can hang out in public. Stop writing sad poetry and you will be good enough for me. Join the cheer squad and get a boyfriend and we can be friends. Who says what friends do and don’t do at sleepovers anyway?_

For the record, these dreams completely and totally _blow_. Because Marina asks, and because Lana does it.

So she thinks she’s hallucinating from sleep deprivation, maybe, or she’s having an unwelcome sequel to the first dream, when she hears her name over the morning announcements. “Lana del Rey, please report to the dean’s office to collect your share of the winnings from last week’s talent show, as Marina Diamandis is such a cowardly asshole you had to skip the award ceremony.” All this in the perky, professional voice of Jules Lewis.

The voice continues: “In effort to be slightly less of a cowardly asshole, Ms. Diamandis would like to say a few words.”

“Is this really happening?” Lana whispers to whoever’s sitting nearest to her in homeroom. It’s that guy Marina barfed on. “Don’t ask me,” he says, all huffy. “ _I_ didn’t get an apology over the loudspeaker, so how would I know what it sounds like?”

Lana digs her fingernails into her thighs to see if she jolts awake. Instead, the sweet bite of pain floods into her at the same time as Marina’s voice.

“There’s a Beat poet named Elise Cowen whose work was never published, ‘cause she was outrageously gay and no one thought she mattered. She killed herself, so maybe you’ve heard of her,” Marina’s saying. Over the loudspeaker. To the entire school. Lana’s entire body is braced to receive a blow. This is the elaborate lead-in to bullying, just like everything else that’s happened between them. Marina is going to make sure the whole school knows she has nothing in common with Lana, some kind of insurance policy so no one would believe Hennie or Lana if they talked. Lana’s face burns with humiliated blood. She slips down as low in her desk as she can, longing to disappear. Her fingernails are in her forearms now, scratching deep into her scarred skin.

“She wrote love poems to long-dead Emily Dickinson, and that’s pretty much perfect. Lana, I want to read one to you.”

Lana’s heart is trying to attack her. She calculates the distance between her desk and the door, tries to figure out if she can make the distance before the weight of everyone watching her run makes her cry.

Because Marina Diamandis is declaiming a love poem, written by a dead queer poet, over the loudspeaker to Lana and everyone. Lana who she has never even been nice to in public. Lana who she has denounced, insulted, rejected in every way. Lana who stupidly, hopelessly, unrequitedly loves her.

“Emily, 

Come summer

You’ll take off your

jeweled bees

Which sting me

I’ll strip my stinking 

jeans

Hand in hand

We’ll run outside

Look straight at

the sun

A second time

And get tan.”

Everyone, _everyone_ , is staring at Lana. Lana’s heart is outside her body at this point. It’s dissociated from her. It’s having an out-of-Lana experience. It’s her exoskeleton, pumping and pulpy and soft, chamber upon chamber of hot salt. She is all nerve, all feeling, all pulse. She’s waiting for someone to laugh, waiting for Marina’s laughter over the loudspeaker to complete her humiliation, and she’s standing on her feet—floating, maybe—without deciding to. This is either the most romantic or the most cruel thing to ever happen to her.

“I have to go to the office,” she says. She hopes out loud. She doesn’t wait for permission from Mr. Meisner—she can’t look at him, knowing that they share one many-legged desire to kiss Marina—before her feet carry her out of homeroom and down the hall.

She runs scenarios numbly, floating towards the front office. She feels so much that it’s the same as not feeling anything. In this moment, nothing is possible or impossible, believable or unbelievable, real or unreal. Lana included. Will Marina and her friends be gathered, laughing, cackling at what a ridiculous lesbian Lana is? Will it just be Marina, shaky and new like a just-opened bloom, with the same soaring ache behind her breastbone that Lana has?

_Hand in hand we’ll run outside, look straight at the sun a second time, and get tan._

Too soon, she’s at the office. Through glass doors she sees Marina, chatting with Jules Lewis. The only way you could tell she’s nervous is that she keeps chewing her lip gloss off her bottom lip, or the way she’s fidgeting with the hem of her uniform skirt.

_Uniform skirt_. Lana has a minor aneurysm at the realization that Marina’s wearing her green tartan skirt and navy blouse from her Welsh school uniform. That with the brown hair, and the open earnest look on her face—she looks like the girl from the picture on the corkboard. Like a girl Lana’s never met, but wants to.

Lana doesn’t have the courage to push open the glass doors and go in, so she does what she always does: flings herself over the fuck-it horizon and moves towards what scares her.

“Well?” she demands, the doors banging open on either side of her. “What the fuck was that about?”

*

Lana storms in like a fury and for all that Marina’s been waiting for her, she jumps half out of her skin because she’s not prepared. Maybe for Lana she’s never prepared. Jules Lewis grabs her arm and shoves her towards Lana, which is fair, since she basically hijacked the loudspeaker from Jules using the power of Jules’ guilt alone.

She thought the poetry thing would, like, speak Lana’s language somehow—soften her. Serve as an apology. Marina got chills, reading that poem. She liked how it was about love without naming love, about sex without naming sex. It was obscure, indirect, and beautiful, and that’s what it’s been like for her, being a gay girl and discovering the way to love. She hoped maybe it was like that for Lana too. Like maybe they could both recognize themselves in a love poem to Emily Dickinson, and recognize each other that way.

But Lana has her fists clenched. Her eyes angry. Her jaw set to snarl. So maybe the poem meant something else to her.

“To me, I think it was about realizing I’m in love with you?” Marina squeaks out. 

She’d bolt, really she would, only she doesn’t think Jules will let her out of here. _Please Jules this is going to change my life, it’s going to change Lana’s life, I have to apologize to her and it has to be public, it has to be huge, I have to tell her I’m in love with her_ , she begged, a big sloppy plaintive mess. It was a lot easier to know what to say to Jules that it is to Lana.

Scary, gorgeous, casually cruel Lana. Lana who has no reason to forgive her and less reason still to love her back. Lana who is staring at her with a face carved from stone. Lana who still has the softest lips Marina has ever looked at. Lana who is dressed perennially in all-black. Lana who would probably rather have Marina’s heart on a roasting fork that Marina’s love.

Lana who she cannot read at all.

“Oh my god, _say_ something, Lana,” Jules hisses. Student government busybody, but Marina’s grateful for it. Marina needs someone on her side.

“I’m just waiting for the punchline,” Lana says calmly. “Go on, Marina. Make a joke at my expense. Turn this into a way to prove to everyone that you’re nothing like me, that Friday was make-believe.”

All at once Marina is done being sorry. Lana is _such_ an asshole sometimes. “Will you just stop? Come _here_ , let me show you. I’m trying to show you. I want to be with you and I don’t care who’s watching.”

Lana has no idea what a big deal it is, Marina saying these words. Feeling these words. Meaning these words. The _reason_ she doesn’t know is because Marina hasn’t told her, so Marina is trying not to hold it against her. Marina tries to show her instead. She walks across the office, step by step taking her closer to Lana. Lana’s hands are fingernail fists that bite into her own skin, but she doesn’t move away. Jules and the office ladies watch with bated breath.

When Marina gets close enough, she reaches out and catches one of Lana’s hands. She uncurls Lana’s fingers, smoothes them out, shivers a little from the chills she gets. She laces their fingers together and when she squeezes, Lana squeezes back. Just like that, they’re holding hands, on purpose, in front of witnesses. Marina’s heart jackknifes in her chest. Lana gives her this quizzical, challenging look, her chin angled up like _I dare you_. Girls hold hands in the hallway all the time. Girls touch each other at sleepovers all the time. Contact like this is still legal. It’s still on the part of the atlas that’s safe.

Marina blazes into new territory. Marina crosses a line. Marina discovers something entirely new.

The fingers of her free hand curl around the curve of Lana’s waist. She slides closer, and Lana still doesn’t pull away. She looks up at Lana, a few inches taller than her, and leans up to press her lips with a kiss.

This isn’t the desperate, elated kiss of last Friday. This is the office-ladies-are-watching, coming-out-at-school kiss. It hesitates. It worries. But still, bravely, their lips meet. There’s heat between them. Lips yield soft, the feeling of heartbeats and need.

Marina pulls back from the kiss softly, rocking back on her heels so she can see Lana’s eyes. She hasn’t breathed in an hour. Lana is pink-faced and dazzled, but she doesn’t look mad. And she hasn’t pushed Marina away.

“You really mean it?” Lana whispers.

Marina kisses her again. “I mean it,” she says. “And I’m sorry I’ve been acting like I didn’t.”

“ _Girls!_ ” comes a sharp voice from behind them. Marina keeps hold of Lana’s hand and spins to face the speaker. “I have a PDA policy at this school.”

It’s the principal, because of course it fucking is. Marina met her when she started here. She gave Aunty Brynn a nametag, gave them both the grand campus tour, and assured Marina she would be available for any of her needs. As if Marina would ever voluntarily spend time with this woman again: with her short, grey hair and her imposing suits, she is like a politician-slash-grandma and she is terrifying.

Imagine how terrifying she is now, then, that she’s walked in on Marina kissing Lana del Rey in the middle of her front office. 

“Ms. Weisman,” says Lana. “So sorry, I was just—”

Ms. Weisman sits on the edge of one of the office ladies’ desks, her legs wide and unladylike. “One. Flagrant PDA. Two. Flagrant PDA _in my office_. Three. Out of class without hall passes or excuses for your absences. Four. Commandeering the morning announcements to read lesbian poetry! This may be the most spectacular way a student of mine has ever earned a detention.”

“Wait, detention?” says Marina. 

“Oh, absolutely. Though I commend you on your literary sleuthing, Diamandis. You Googled hard to find that poem.”

“Do I also get detention?” Lana pipes in. “I was not involved in the commandeering or the lesbian poem.”

Ms. Weisman raises her eyebrows at their hands, still linked. “You look involved to me, del Rey.”

Lana’s face turns crimson, but she steps closer to Marina, knocking their shoulders together. Marina leans into her a little and hopes leaning doesn’t count as PDA.

Ms. Weisman stands, straightens her jacket, and claps authoritatively. “One last thing. This is regular detention, okay? Any two people of any gender would get detention for this. Whatever you girls are doing, it warms my heart to see it.” And Ms. Weisman _winks_ , making the office ladies scowl and return to their bustling busywork. Marina can’t believe it. The last time an administrator got proof she liked girls, she was expelled from her school and her entire country. All Ms. Weisman is doing is winking and make sure they know it’s regular detention, not gay detention?

Ms. Weisman swaggers down the hall to her office and Marina revises her opinion. The principal looks a terrifying politician-slash-grandma-slash-lesbian. And that’s actually a little less scary.

*

Once they start kissing, they don’t stop.

Nearly eighteen years of unkissed kisses have bottled up in Lana, and they start spilling out under Marina’s touch. The other girl’s fingers brush the soft part of her wrist and it’s unbearable, so imagine how it wrecks her when they’re alone in the cramped sports supply room they’re supposed to be organizing for detention, when Marina turns to her with blazing black eyes and steps towards her until their whole bodies touch and Lana’s back presses into the wall. Marina traces her cheekbone, the curve of her jaw, with pressure so light it feels sacred. Marina slides her fingers into Lana’s hair, thick but tender at the nape of her neck, and twists just enough to entangle herself. Her gaze is so hot it leaves smeary, rainbow heat trails in the air above Lana’s body, wherever it touches her. Lana is shaking, can barely breathe, before Marina’s lips ever touch her.

Marina kisses the place where her jaw meets her throat, firm and curious, and Lana’s knees are already threatening to give. Marina moves up her jawline, leaving behind lip gloss glitter with each kiss, and Lana turns her head to catch Marina’s lips when she can’t take it any longer. Her hands find the way to Marina’s hips, the soft skin buried between blouse and skirt, and she can’t believe how warm and real Marina is. How here she is. How this is really happening.

They kiss, and kiss, and kiss. Lana’s body aches with years of longing. Her fingers are clumsy on the buttons of Marina’s blouse and she doesn’t care if this is too fast, because she’s burning up. Marina gasps a little when her blouse falls all the way open, revealing her flat, California tan stomach, the tired-looking elastic of her sports bra, her collarbones, the curves of her without clothing to obscure them. Lana has never seen anyone more beautiful. Marina’s fingertips climb Lana’s ribs like a trellis, up under her sweater spreading shivers. Then Lana’s sweater is a black puddle on the supply room floor, and Marina’s tongue is in her mouth and Marina’s bare skin is flush against parts of Lana that have never been touched, not like this.

Lana’s kissing Marina’s neck, moving lower, her mouth metallic with excitement and danger as she moves towards the dip between Marina’s breasts. Marina groans in her ear, then traps Lana’s hands where they’re creeping lower down Marina’s hip bones. “We may not have been expelled from this school yet, but skirts off is pushing it,” she breathes.

Lana sends her tongue lower, and Marina laughs low and slow in her throat. She grabs a metal shelf of sweaty football pads for support, swaying with pleasure. “I think I’m willing to risk it,” Lana tells Marina’s sports bra. “Take this off.”

Marina laughs again, clasps Lana’s hands together, and pulls them away. She takes a step back, dizzy-eyed and sparkling, glitter smeared around her mouth and dark eyes pinpricked with light like the night sky. Her hair is rumpled and her cheeks are pink and Lana is in love.

Marina does the opposite of what Lana wants, starts buttoning her shirt again from the bottom. “Promise I will, when we’re at home behind a door that locks.” Lana’s heart wilts a little, not just from sexual frustration: she’s sensitive to the idea Marina’s hiding this, hiding them, even after everything that happened this morning with the poem and Ms. Weisman and walking through school holding hands all day long. “While we work, maybe I can tell you the real story of why I left Wales? Because I really was expelled, El. And it was over girls without their skirts on.”

Lana stops pouting and picks up her sweater. She’s a little shaky, a little lightheaded, and stupid with happiness. “That does sound like my kind of story.”

Marina leans in and kisses her cheek, quick and sweet. “And then I’ll tell you more about what we can do behind that locked door,” Marina adds, right in Lana’s ear. “Do you want to sleep over tonight?”

It’s the first detention Lana’s ever served. She looks forward to the next.

*

There are so many places two girls can be alone together without raising suspicion. Bathrooms, one another’s beds, fitting rooms at the mall, inside any closet, under any tree, in the secret hollow in a hedgerow. That’s just what girls do: whisper, clasp hands, and slip away. The bonds of female friendships are so permeable, so porous. Together they sneak right through them.

Marina and Lana make a map together of all those secret places. They tangle their legs together on couches, watching dark feminist films with Hennie and sometimes Jules Lewis; they steal kisses in the school hallways, and especially in the back corners of the library, whenever there aren’t any teachers around. Marina keeps being perfectly friendly and nice to Ivy and her other friends, but they don’t invite her to things anymore. “Sorry, Reen,” Ivy says with a simpering, insincere smile. “I just don’t feel safe with you anymore. It’s nothing personal.” Marina is offended in a half-hearted way and not surprised. She always knew what kind of person Ivy was. That’s why Marina chose her, really: what better camouflage? So she says, “Y’know, even lesbians have standards, luv,” and walks away backwards so she can really appreciate the look on Ivy’s face.

She quits cheer over winter break, decides to join drama club when school starts back up. She’s invited home for Christmas, of course, but decides not to go. She just finally stopped being ashamed; she can’t quite bear going back to Wales and acting like she still is. Besides, as Aunty Brynn loves teasing her about, she can’t go five minutes without mentioning Lana with a goopy, lovesick grin. Spending the holidays apart, pretending Lana doesn’t exist, sounds perfectly miserable. She and Aunty Brynn go to Lana’s parents’ apartment for Christmas dinner instead. It is as awkward as you’d think. Lana’s hand slips higher and higher up Marina’s skirt under the table with each stolen sip of champagne. By the end of the night Marina is brave enough to kiss Lana under the mistletoe, and no one throws her out. No one even really seems to care.

Marina didn’t know love tasted better aerated, shown to the world instead of hidden; now it stains her tongue. Now she is quite drunk with it. Now she can’t wait to find out how much else of the world is still undiscovered.

Because they are a wonder to each other, they set out, bolder together than ever apart, to explore. And they are happy. They look forward to what comes next.

  
  



End file.
